Thursday, June 12, 2008

Master of our Domain

Half the people had turned into squealing pigs, the other half were cooking- Nick Cave

There's a Kids in the Hall sketch in which Mark McKinney plays a loner who's injured his toe. By the swelling, the pus and the change of colour he knows it needs attention, but he can't get motivated to go to the hospital, because "as it is, I'm fascinated by the process!" His leg has gone numb below the knee, and he can stick a fork in it and not feel a thing. "Now that," he says, "is interesting!"

Here's the thing.

In the dying days of Hillary Clinton's campaign, a wistful and perhaps at last unhinged Bill liked to say how there comes a time when we know we have more yesterdays than tomorrows. For civilizations, too. And the borrowedness of our moments of plenty should be, finally, achingly manifest.

Agricultural soils are being eroded at a rate 10 to 40 times that of soil formation. (Iowa alone has lost half of its topsoil in the last 150 years.) The ingestion and absorption of industrial toxicities has contributed to an endocrine disruption that's resulted in a 40% decline in sperm count in 50 years. And the atrocities of global industry has so contaminated the milk of Inuit mothers that it can be categorized as hazardous waste.

Energy and food are being priced out of reach of the poor. (I mean our poor: the genetic detritus of developed nations. The rest? Let them eat mud cakes. It may be the end of the world as we know it, but it’s still the world they have always known.) Like a deleted scene from Children of Men, a pray-in was held five weeks ago at a San Francisco Chevron station to beseech God for lower fuel prices. Gas has risen about 40 cents since. Demand for cheap and "green" biofuels is devastating forests, and stealing food and habitat from the other poor. Besides other things, Soylent Green is fuel efficient.

Climatologists are throwing out their most pessimistic forecasts, since reality has already outstripped them. More carbon dioxide is being discharged into the atmosphere now than even the worst-case scenario in last year's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "We're seeing events predicted for the end of the 21st century happening already," Adelaide University's Barry Bock told the Canberra conference Imagining the Real Life on a Greenhouse Earth, and anticipates a temperature rise of six degrees. Such a spike would mimic the conditions of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, which came as close as anything has to eradicating all life on Earth. "Oxygen isotopes in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch [the release of the ocean's methane hydrates] than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene":

Sedimentary layers show that most of the world's plant cover was removed in a catastrophic bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a "fungal spike" as plants and animals rotted in situ. Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic. Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.

One scientific paper investigating "kill mechanisms" during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely". Acting much like today's fuel-air explosives (or "vacuum bombs"), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

I don't know if time's speeding up or we're winding down, but Nostradamus doesn't seem of much use anymore. The last few months have felt, to me, like the closing of a door. Ahead is another door, only one, and we have no choice but to walk through it.

As it is,I'm fascinated by the process! Which, I suppose happily enough, can still appall me.

Conspiracies, too, fascinate, and are the reality of parapolitical culture, but conspiracy culture is its reality television. Even if someone does bust the conspiracy wide open! as Alex Jones has promised that so many of his broadcasts would do, justice would be served to the same extent The Bachelor is genuinely searching for true love. Seven years gone since September 11, and the singular accomplishment of "9/11 Truth" appears to have been the creation of another Great American Pastime. Sirhan could not have killed Robert Kennedy, but four decades later he's still in prison. And even when an American Court found the federal government and its agencies to be co-conspirators in the death of Martin Luther King, the judgment left no mark upon the guilty.

The Internet is often thought an egalitarian blessing by those who would hold high criminals accountable, yet the only accounting rendered is online. I don't think the guilty regard this as an unfortunate development. I think we've been corralled into cyberspace, taken as freedom its "free speech zones," and adopted its virtual and vulnerable bantustans as our "domains." (Appropriately so called, since its mastery entered mass culture as a euphemism for masturbaton.) We can win the blog wars, but we may as well have been playing World of Warcraft for all the difference it will make when the power goes out and we lose our connection. The connection for which we may have forsaken many others of much higher worth.

So this is my dilemma, and my paralysis. It's not every day you get to spectate the real-time collapse of a planetary civilization and biosphere. (Or, I suppose I should say, I remember a time when it wasn't.) But watching this unfold with fascination feels complicit and worse than if I were blithely ignorant, and analyzing it at this seeming late stage futile and ridiculous. What's important now, what's more important than ever, are the close-to-home matters: being a good father and husband, and learning how to best cushion the crash of our coddled urban lives.

That's why I'd lost my words. I'm getting them back, and I'll be posting with regularity again, which feels good because I'm a writer and I don't know what else to do with them. But my regard for them has changed.

It's like Harvey Pekar says, in the August issue of American Splendor:

"I thought about it and I realized that i might be part of the last generation that has experienced 'normal life' for some time... I try to think of positive things, you know, like I'm happy about what's been happening with my writing. But in the face of the upcoming disaster everything seems futile."

I'd have rather posted something else, but I couldn't write anything until I'd written this.

The Kids In The Hall sketch you referenced is an excellent analogy, Jeff. We, who know, are so mezmerized by the spectacle of decay, all we can do is comment about it, rather than preparing the patient for amputation.

a pray-in was held five weeks ago at a San Francisco Chevron station to beseech God for lower fuel prices. Gas has risen about 40 cents since.

and yet major metropolitan areas, including the one in which i reside, in the u.s. remain in traffic gridlock. at what price point is too much, too much? i honestly don't know? is it $6, or $8, or $20? at what price point do the numbskulls say i'm just not going to make that commute, or i'm not going to see that friend on the other side of the city today? surely, that point must exist. maybe "they" are testing for that point. maybe we are purposely being pushed to our limits, like unwitting rats in a lab experiment. if so, i wish i could remain unwitting, because what we may find out, and ultimately know, can only hurt us, not them. that much we know is true, don't we, jeff?

i'm a father too, jeff, so don't take this the wrong way, but what exactly does being a good father and husband entail when we are all complicit in feeding this metaphorical beast? for example, is a characteristic of a good father, honesty? if so, how do you relate how you feel about the world to your children? do you shelter them from the tragic prospects, or do you traumatize them with what you believe to be the truth, stripping them of security, no matter how false that security may be?

Jeff, you've done your part and shed some light in very dark corners. Your writing has been a positive force in my life and many others will continue on with what you've done.

But is there anything more to talk about on here? I think we can say that we've all "figured it out" by now.

There is more to our lives than just watching our wounds bleed and pus over.And now only the best things are left...time with the ones that we love. So let the damn Internet go to Hell. Let's go meet our neighbors and spend time with our families. They're the ones who are going to be with us if/when the Deal Goes Down.

Goodbye Rigorous Intuition! It definitely got Weird enough for me.

May you all freely give and receive the love that we all deserve. Lead rich and full lives...its all up to you.

"Conspiracies, too, fascinate, and are the reality of parapolitical culture, but conspiracy culture is its reality television. Even if someone does bust the conspiracy wide open! as Alex Jones has promised that so many broadcasts would do, justice would be served to the same extent The Bachelor is genuinely searching for true love"I could not have ever said that better. Thank you for using your gift as a writer to manifest the truth of these things.So it seems you have hit the nail on the head...sort of, if I get what you are saying in this post--and i think it's this--that it's the end of the world and watching it all go up in flames (or gas if oceanic methane burps get us..) is great but what is there to do? what is there to do but be a good father and husband...connect to people in a real way..etc. etc. as the world decays and crime rises and your family is shipped off to a labour camp because you owe money to the credit card companies...The World of Warcraft analogy was pretty good...One of my students today was talking about that game with another student and i felt so...old.Made me think of how i must have sounded talking about AD&D with my nerdy friends when i was a kid.But how things of amusement fade and we occupy ourselves with so much bullshit. It's who we are, really. We want to be entertained and that is why some might think that conspiracy culture is just a kind of amusing pastime for people.I really don't see it that way, though. I think that's missing the mark, feeding into the whole "oh you need to believe in conspiracies to feel important! You don't want to believe that terrorists could pull off 9/11 you want to believe that our government is to blame because the alternative is to scary for you, poor feeble minded fool.." line. It's like Jeff, you are really saying it's not worth it. And i agree...most of the time. i just can't help wanting to rage against the machine, the predatory raping and pillaging of the country I live in by a global crime syndicate.I realize that the decadence of the West has caused its collapse, and we're seeing that now, but a slow steady decline where there might still be a chance to turn something around, if something amazing happens...which it probably won't.I guess rebellion is just in my blood.

Long time reader, first time poster here. I have been reading RI for many years. I dont think I have missed a post. I'll check back, and back, and then, yes a new post. Always astonishingly worded and insightful. After a hiatus, Jeff is back, and still at the top of his artform. Thanks Jeff, for the entertainment and thought provoking over the years.

Then I go out there, into the rest of the world, and the panic is not shared. If anything, the adrenal jolt I get from RI is a welcome relief to the drudgery of the everyday.

Then I come to realize that I seek a certain affective jolt, measured in galvanic sensations, ripples of goosebumps, and cardiopulmonary jolts. I have also used drugs and horror films to approach cortisol buzzes that shock me out of anhedonia.

RI, like many a doomsday message throughout human history, evinces the terror that is actually a phenomenological, affective sensation. Its located, not in the putative empirical reality 'out there' but in the secretions of hormones. The content, alas, is incidental. There are always anecdotes to be cherry picked when one wants to appear to substantiate a categorical inclination towards melancholia.

A relation to finitude, externalized, so that the planet might share in our hurtling towards mortality. They come and go, their henny-penny hand wringing folding into the dustbin of time. But the earth, in its tortoise like banality, goes on.

I blogged over at Deconsumption for several years about the impending "collapse of civilization" (as I saw it and still see it over the long haul). And as you alluded, I found it strangely fascinating, perhaps like a deer in the headlights...and I felt a sense of urgency in understanding what might come so that I could "Be Prepared". And all that study and observation truly helped, I must say. Over time, I stopped being worried about what was coming down upon us. I began to see it as inevitable, but not something I couldn't adapt to. So eventually, I became confident enought to embrace some big decisions and started steering my life in a way that was both exciting and interesting to me as well as creating flexibility enough to meet whatever may come.

And at that point I became completely bored with apocalyptic news and thinking. So now, just as so many people are just beginning to tune in, I've turned off. I used to feel that if you weren't getting your news from the internet, you were either ignorant of what is really happening in he world or worse, feeding on the steady diet of distractions and lies that is our MSM. I spent at least a couple hours a day surfing and analysing and trying to comprehend the objective picture. Now somehow, I find I lose patience if I'm online for more than about 20 minutes.

And meanwhile, as you perhaps seem to be experiencing as well, my life just gets better and better. Not because I've sunk into denial, but because my time is rapidly filling up with things that really matter to me right now. My family and I are in constant movement, but it's movement towards something. Things are busy and frustrating but also fun and exciting and worthwhile. And it just keeps getting better and better.

But my point is that, at least for my own experience, all of this came about as the result of taking a full look at the worst. But (unlike Mark McKinney's character) also knowing when I'd seen enough to inform my decisions and to get on with living.

I don't know if any of the above is even interesting to anyone here, and I apologize if not. But I've spent a good ten years coming to a point where I could write exactly that.

The only danger we face over these next few years--as a full understanding of what we've truly sown is being reaped--the only danger is that we may succumb to fear, worry, and the desire to calm ourselves through wilfull denial and ignorance.

So how does that prepare them for the calamity to come? Or, deep down do you believe this is all just idle speculation, and the end won't be all that dramatic, so there's really no need to prepare them? by sheltering your children from the terrible truth, do you not soften them, and give them a false sense of security, a security that will be shattered into a million pieces like a piece of antique china accidentally dropped on a slate floor?

Thank you for using your gift as a writer to manifest the truth of these things.

But in the last thread, I thought certain you were highly touting Alex Jones. For what it's worth, and that's exactly nothing, but it's my nothing and I'm happy for it, Alex Jones is a wanking pile of doo doo. I'd hate to have to use the bathroom after him. If there's a hell, that would be it.

Things are busy and frustrating but also fun and exciting and worthwhile. And it just keeps getting better and better.

Well, isn't that special. Too bad about those people chowing on mud cakes, though. Of course, it's all about perpsective, I suppose. Eating mud cakes can be frustrating, but also exciting and worthwhile, if all you have above your shoulders is a brain stem, that is.

Thank you for your insights Jeff. I feel that this latest post has definitely served to confirm a feeling I've had more and more recently. That as the negligence and the denial cascades and the momentum of the situation leads us to the inevitable outcome of the present global situation. We may become the first species with the ability to consciously speculate and share our observations with one another up until the very last minute, at which time we will have done nothing to prepare or prevent it, having wasted our precious time paralyzed by awe as it unfolds. But who's to say that is our shared fate.

I was and still do tout.what Jeff wrote, unless i completely misread it (possible) was that the conspiracy culture and the busting of the story wide open (though Jones already did it)by the MSN would be as scripted as reality television and hold as much impact.I'm talking about a third path.The one where we try to do something even though we'll probably fail.And that's what Jones does, though HE believes he won't fail and a glorious revolution is possible.I respect him for that.Plus, no one gets that fired up about anything anymore except maybe professional wrestlers.or the Hulk.

Our interpretations of Jeff's Alex Jones comment obviously differ. I took him to mean that conspiracy has gone prime time and the likes of Alex Jones are the Rush Limbaughs of that venue. They are not interested in a solution, just subscribers and ratings, and in all of that miasma, the truth and any possible, and properly focused, action gets lost.

I know that veiw of Jones is widespred and I even subscribed to it for a while, more chewed on it but couldn't swallow it. seems more like an attempt to discredit him and for obvious reasons.He comes off as an ass-hat and completely insane to alot of people. I see his passion, his Hitleresque gesticulations as trully telling of what happens when you have nothing left to lose.And when you really believe that unless you personally stand up for what you believe, well...you know where I'm going with that.To suggest that it's an act is a bit strange to me, since he's been like that since I started listening to him well before 9/11(which he predicted) and the "suicide" of the DC madame (that was pretty obvious though)To suggest that he is a disinformationist seems insane to me. So given the difficulty in following Jones' path and the insanity of doing nothing but staring in wonder at the colapse of the world (while living your life as best as you can) won't be an option eventually.So ....The Third path of finding something to do on a personal level seems the only alternative.@ian:"consciously speculate and share our observations with one another up until the very last minute, at which time we will have done nothing to prepare or prevent it, having wasted our precious time paralyzed by awe as it unfolds."nice.

@Jeff - Glad to see you back. Wow, that one read like a John Brunner. I particularly cringed at the sperm-count thing - no wonder I got away with all that barebackin'. Sheeoot. Blanks, that is.

I don't think things are too hopeless, though. Blogwars be damned - there's a crudpack of useful knowledge archived in so many computers by now thanks to DARPANET's toy that all a post-collapse school will need is a generator, a computer, and someone to scout storage media troves.

As to soil depletion - hell, the solution's an easy one.

Step 1. Sell the peasants personal bomb shelters after starting a pat-a-cake little war with China. Build public ones for the poor. Build them badly and at great expense.

Step 2. Set off flashbulbs over San Fran, Denver, and Detroit. Result: Peasants get into boxes and wait.

Step 3: Wait for the 72-hour plague the idiots were sprayed with just before the bombs went off to have its no doubt grisly and spattery effects. Nerve-gas any crowds that have caught on.

Step 4. Employ the survivors at starvation wages to empty the 'bomb shelters' full of dead peasants into the ground. Wait two generations. In the meantime, why not plant poppies on the fertilizer cough holy gravesites?

Step 5. Recolonize the area from your latest Beacon Of Freedom (Tel Aviv? New Zealand? Mars?). Wipe out any organized remnants of the original governing structures. Make up a new history for the peasants over pearls dissolved in vinegar and DMT one night. Laugh at them.

There you go - soil problem solved!

I don't think we are really facing a planetary collapse of civilization. That may have happened last time the boss-men turned up the volume too loud - Atlantis, anyone? However, we've developed clipping control. I bet Sichuan was just the beginning of a very interesting series of events - but I doubt we'll go down.

Just most of us will.

I personally think there's better ways. New communication protocols should be leading the way to new governance structures. While there may be some death throes, I think top-down walled-fort organization is like, SO over, dude. Structured nonarchy and self-assembling, situationally responsive legal and economic systems will just outcompete kings and kingmakers, sheep and shepherds.

I do agree that most of us are going to fail to die of natural causes in the relatively near term. We'll deal a fiery, filthy fate upon the world in this latest intentional global exarcerbation of the warconomic cycles (a.k.a. WWIII for geezers like me). However, our tech will live on through the massive holographing of knowledge you and I are engaged in right now. The few surviving peasants will be much, much more useful and efficient than previous editions - tech civilization is now self-perpetuating.

Big question in my mind - what else is self-perpetuating these days? Our future may be pretty some footnotish history soon. Cyberiad draws nigh.

@Jeff again: P.S. What does the door you see ahead of us look like? For America, I see another Presidential disaster (either a false Billary win followed by race war and Paulite revolution, or a Big O win followed by assasination, race war, and Paulite revolution.

With chances of plague, worsening starvation, and infrastructure failure later in the day.

Heh. Nero legendarily fiddled in the musical sense at this point, didn't he? Our modern Caesars are more likely to be found fiddling with themselves. Or some paperboy. Or Lord knows a horse. Bloody hairy-handed colonial farmers.

@Fletch - Good work sending videos and working up a lather in general on folks' behalf. It's not that it's hopeless - it's just that change is slow and life is short. You're having some effect, no doubt.

Just don't get shot.

Hey, maybe I'll be camp cook at the Citizen Recycling Center you end up at. Beats digging latrines. I'll see if I can get you in as a scullion.

Believing honestly that all that extra lime in the stadium is for soccer season's enormous demand for field markings,Lord R.

P.P.S. Damn, broken grammar again in my last post. Probly some in this one too. I really should edit this stuff, but who has the time?

TripleP.S. - They really are making the bomb shelter/disposal bin things. I saw them over at Fletcher's blog (I think it was his). Just looks like a tip - I think it even had slots for the garbage truck cough body recovery team.

Ok the spring forest qigong c.d. is the PRACTICE which is very simple but the more you practice it the more powerful your experiences get. So think of it like a harmonic oscillator -- a vibrating string -- the stronger the vibrations the more complex the overtones become.

The string itself -- consciousness -- does not change.

So yes Qigong Master Chunyi Lin has achieved the highest levels described in Taoist Yoga -- he told me he created another physical body -- that it was seen by others. Also Qigong master Chunyi Lin has quoted from the book Taoist Yoga -- detailed the final meditation states -- when I had brought the book to class but had kept it in my bag.

As qigong master Chunyi Lin stated in his most recent radio interview there's 12 main energy channels in the body that every person has. There's also 12 points for the small universe and there's 12 notes to the music scale. All are built from yang as 2:3 and yin as 3:4, the perfect fifth and perfect fourth harmonics.

You just sit on a chair, listen to the 12 notes of the scale, focus your mind on those points, and practice the scale. One c.d. is 1/2 hour practice for $11. Another c.d. is one hour of small universe.

@Steven Lagavulin: F^&*(n right on, sir. The world as we know it shall indeed end, but why should human endeavour and (hopefully) my personal life be anything other than strengthened and dignified by the process?

I just hope to last long enough to see our silver children spawn. The price of rice is one thing, but serious change is another.

In the meantime - download useful, intersting information of any kind and store it multiply. Print things that are useful. Set your news-checker or whatever to looking for handy diagrams of stoves and instructions on pruning. You know - holograph that sh*t. Trouble's coming. We all smell it. Do something that is at least hopefully useful.

Off to what could well be my last hot bath before the collapse turns off the power for good,Lord Reptor.

P.S. Oh, wait. After the collapse, where would I get bubblebath? I guess everything is hopeless after all. Darn.

Ditto Steven L, above.I'm plum worn out of the doomsday - not that I disbelieve that a catastrophe is coming, but because I realize now that I am obligated to LIVE .. not to merely exist while waiting for the end.And, really, I don't forsee an end so to speak. Just a change.the constant.change.my own personal life in some karmic way seems to be preparing me for the topsy turvy future. I can't tell you what the last 15 months have wrought here at home.It's just a day to day life we live. so live.......so LIVE.

Hey Jeff you hit my vagus. Interesting to see the future has already come and gone for the Palestinians. The fact of the matter is that we are looking at survival of the fittest and it's the fittest into the last stool in the musical chairs Russian roulette that couples with the survival and evolution of mankind. If you can see the future and you don't take steps to slip through the crack in time/space into infinity and beyond, you aren't giving your gene pool much credit.

I've had the exact same thought enter my brainspace, about being corralled in "free speech zones" in cyberspace. I was going to write a short story about the idea, but as usual I didn't. The working title was "Data Zone 82 Contained." The idea was that this accidental conglomeration of personalities was being led into "Data Zones." Alex Jones and Jeff Wells, among others, would serve as models for the shepherds of this plot.

The title would have served as the last line in the story, a young psyops government employee reports to his superior, "Data Zone 82 Contained, Sir." The twist is that everything you think is subversive and revolutionary is just another opiate.

I'm glad you're focusing on the close matters, my friend. Hopefully that, at least and finally, will endow your spirit with a little optimism.

Civilization is NOT going to collapse anytime soon,sirs. Has the state of Israel collapsed yet? NO. Will it anytime soon? NO. How long did pre-industrial feudal society exist before the trajectory toward the democratization and egalitarian social systems. You're all slaves and will remain so. Civilization will only end (and has been ending) for a few niggers, specs, and gooks that's all. Useless eaters who cares - they don't code in java, so fuck'em. Nothing new.

OK so I was PM'd again about breath retention and what happens to the ejaculate when I climax. As the number of climaxes increase the level of trance or samadhi deepens and the breath is held long -- essentially the conceptual brain stops and the pressure builds on the legs and the stomach naturally just sucks in. This is what yogananda -- or Yukteswar -- called "Breathless ecstasy." I'm not actually obtaining true "samadhi" -- instead I'm just redirecting the "generative fluid" or ejaculate up the back into the brain. As my A.B.C. -- American-Born Chinese friend in high school stated about qigong -- "too much jism in the brain." Well this is true until the generative fluid is converted or ionized into generative force.

So the "O at a D" is based on the MAGNETIC LIGHT attraction -- works through walls!! -- that is sucked up by the female jing or electrochemical energy and is projected by the full-lotus. The two work together.

The generative fluid would normally leak up without transducing the lower emotions into "love-light." The chi as it shoots out of the pineal gland is composed of three parts -- each to a different degree. So there's the shen (light) the chi (electromagnetic) and the jing (electrochemical). "O at a Ds" rely on these three parts -- the third eye has to be open for the O at a D to work -- but the "chi" is still composed mainly of the jing, although it's projected through the "love-light" or electromagnetic-shen, as guided by consciousness or female formless awareness.

So, again, the ejaculate shoots up to the brain, ALONG WITH ANEROBIC BACTERIA. So I smell like shit all the time because I eat shit -- McDonalds, whatever! -- I looked this up -- the Vagus Nerve transduces serotonin AND anerobic bacteria. As the pineal gland shoots that out, as electrochemical energy attatched to the "love-light" - then the brain heats up and gets more magnetized and creates light. You start to see light around peoples' heads, get more telepathy, precognition, LOVE, etc. But the process is what my co-workers call "Turning Shit to Gold." And believe me their a bit peeved about this! haha. So I'm still experimenting with diet -- so far the best anti-septic is tea tree oil but you have to careful not to take too much or it creates drunkeness.

Anyway I probably had at least 20 "O at a Ds" today. I didn't keep track but I had about 7 before I even left my house and then probably 10 at the park and another 3 at McDs and another 7 at the Mall and then probably 3 at the library, so whatever.

I call this "full-body digestion." The point is that last summer I went 3 days without eating and yet was never hungry -- I just lived off "O at a Ds." Then I read that oxytocin creates a "full" sensation. Well, as qigong master Chunyi Lin states -- you create all the protein and nutrients you need -- EVEN WATER -- from the electromagnetic-light transduction. In 2000 I went 8 days on half a glass of water. I'd do it again but my mom was so pissed at me I'm afraid my family might try to lock me up or something. haha.

Qigong master Chunyi Lin went at least 28 days with no food, no water, no sleep. Just full-lotus.

So I sat in full-lotus the whole time I was having "O at a Ds" today -- the pressure builds up, it creates a magnetic field shooting out of the pineal gland, this in turn attracts electrochemical energy (sometimes male perverts, but that just goes with the territory). The electromagnetic energy shoots into the electrochemical energy and is in turn sucked up by the electrochemical energy. This, in turn, pulls up the electrochemical energy in my body. The result is a mutual climax at a distance, again, even through walls.

The electrochemical energy transduced also includes the other lower emotions besides lust -- sadness, fear, worry, anger. So you just keep sitting in full-lotus and these emotions turn into light and then back into consciousness -- AFTER the pineal gland is opened up. To open up the pineal gland you practice the small universe and active exercises combined with full-lotus. Diet is the next most important thing after emotions -- Taoist Yoga recommends NO SALT for one thing.

When you open up the pineal gland then you achieve IMMORTAL BREATHING -- which means that the palms and the center of the feet pulsate with electromagnetic energy, thereby converting directly into the electrochemical energy you need and also the pineal gland creates water through some sort of reverse electrolysis -- which then runs down the roof of your mouth. So at that stage lung breathing is next to nothing and then the room starts spinning around you -- the top of your head opens up and FINALLY you achieve TRUE EMPTINESS or nirvikalpa samadhi. I got to this stage but, as Master Nan, Huai-chin details, as is the case for most, FELL BACK INTO WORLDLINESS. So qigong Master Chunyi Lin stuck his finger to my forehead and ever since my pineal gland has been permanently magnetized with bliss. My practice since then has just been for fun and then I read a book a day on average.

I agree the transhumanist/eugenic/electronic mind control part of the puzzle is missing here. And a very important part it is. Wells and A. Jones are inexorably linked in certain ways. Jones uses 'conspiracy' to fuel nationalism and a pro-gun agenda. Wells has been using the 'environmental catastrophe' angle to fuel a similar 'survivalist' and elitist racist (not the first time Mr.Wells has made explicitly racist comments -"the genetic detritus?") end amongst his primarily white readership. These crimes of omission go unquestioned - blog entry after blog entry.) The human diet and food production as it is, no longer require the environmental criteria that are being degraded. Assuming that these stories are REAL. And in any event, the consumer of means will pay a premium and those using 'complex tools' (the transhumanist elect) will have the means at their disposal to survive. Time to shut this blog down and move on to Britney and Miley full time.

" Civilization will only end (and has been ending) for a few niggers, specs, and gooks that's all. Useless eaters who cares - they don't code in java, so fuck'em. Nothing new."

I doubt it anony. Folk tough enough to fight for life at under a dollar a day will have fat Westerners, who think that faint tummy grumbling that comes every day at noon is "hunger," beat all to hell and back.

Then again, 40 + years of buying billions of dollars of weapons might turn this place into the empire it aches to be.

More guilt for liberals though.

I guess that here's where we test the resolve of all those "no blood for oil" moralists.

All morality is, at its core, based on the fullness of one's stomach and the fullness of one's children's stomaches.

Really hungry people always seem to make some neat rationalizations about morality that wouldn't hold up at a full, all you can eat, buffet.

And just think of all those millions of weapons out there in private hands.

Oh well. Terence McKenna has always maintained that these horrors are necessary shadows cast by the future event that will transform us somewhere around 2012. Hopefully the transformation point will be local, because, by 2012, gas will probably be somewhere around $100 a gallon and I'd hate to miss out because I can't afford the gas.

There is a bright side though. Just think of that small group of die-hard Survivalists who will get to do what every mocked and satired conspiracy theorist aches to do, which is jump up and down and scream, "I TOLD YA SO. DIDN"T I FUCKING TELL YOU? DID YOU LISTEN? NOOOOOOOOOOO! I WAS A CRACKPOT, EH? HA! WHO'S LAUGHING NOW BUDDY? WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?"

Anonymous One,Jeff,I checked out the Nick Cave vid,what synchonicity,the fucken thing was just like my trip to Club Super Sexe last weekend.And yes this place is running out of everything but no one has time to really care because it hasn't crashed down on them yet,it's not going to be long though.More than just the soil in this place has eroded,the light has left the souls of many in the land of plenty,there is a dark forbode that we walk in.For the most part HDTV is the only reality folks around here know anymore,entrainment is not that easy to break out of if you have no control over your own mind.When the sick bastards finally filp the switch on this world,they will tune this hive mind to some strange shit,just be ready for some real SCI-FI,later.

I really love these last two comments."I TOLD YA SO. DIDN"T I FUCKING TELL YOU? DID YOU LISTEN? NOOOOOOOOOOO! I WAS A CRACKPOT, EH? HA! WHO'S LAUGHING NOW BUDDY? WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?"That's perfect.perfect.@ReptorIt would be an honour to be a scullion in your kitchen (whatever a scullion is) but I guess getting shot would be an honourable way to go out too...

what's with the "the transhumanist/eugenic/electronic mind control part of the puzzle is missing here"I'm pretty sure that Jeff has written about that before, just not in this post. Sure it's all in the mix and whatever's going on at Sandia National Labs probably is going to be linked with HAARP and HDTV and blue ray and wii paddles...Sci Fi for sure...

The interesting aspect of your geology lesson is that life has evolved out of catastrophism. My experience in geology and palaeontology leaves me with the eerie feeling that life on the skin of Mother Earth is simply a means to an end.

whoaaa. i think D>L has come closest to the mark here. as Geshe Michael Roach has written, everything must die eventually; every person, every business, and every civilization. in some profound way, things are coming to a head in the developed world, and yet another catastrophe is unfolding in the other 80% of the world--for "the other poor."

so as Kevin at Cryptogon has promised, or even the Jonesian NWO freaks imply, in some form or another, some type of rump society will persist through even the gloomiest of outcomes. but no totalitarianism can stay total, really. at the end of the day, come what may, we'll just have to grow our own food and use renewable energy. attendant to that paradigm shift, the possibilities are vast.

so what about this net thing? the way i see it, it's completely necessary. as sanitized as it is, history does offer some invaluable lessons. the problem is, no one writes letters anymore. this blog will serve as a source of rich information in the stead of all those missing letters. that alone is priceless. i don't care if it gets zapped. Jeff's posts are unforgettable!

but back to D>L. he's right. the panic just isn't there, out there in 'consensus reality.' if THE crisis hits, who will be better prepared? obviously some loons will be out to lunch, but for us reasonable C-O-N-spiracy folk, will we enter the fray as informed leaders? there just aren't any guarantees, any which way. [a loon being ex. anyone who would accuse Jeff of discursive gatekeeping. it's all been said 3 times on this blog]

Ben Fulford promises a Deus ex machina. 'Insider 13,' the putative bloodline spokesman, promises that nothing save your own personal enlightenment is relevant. any way you slice it though, Jeff is right, being in your world is primary. waiting for the end will not be met by spontaneous freedom nor merciful extinction, but merely the dreadful banality of procrastination.

May I indulge in pointless speculation? no?too bad.yeah, I get that feeling at times too. But we are all part of Mother Earth (unless we were deposited via starseed ... by a crashed meteor with dna in it..from another world... or aliens)assuming that we did "evolve" we are part of the ecosystem and may be about to be sloughed off by the self regulating system of Gaia.Or perhaps our polluting and warfare is part of the natural process of humanity and our horrible abusive relationship with our homeworld (?)Assuming that the Biblical account of creation is accurate (which I know we don't) then all of this tribulation is fortold and will unfold and end up making sense of the Book of Revelation. Like in the movie Southland Tales.

The life of Life progresses and grows just as does every other living thing. As above, so below. Bet on it.

And things die, too. Naturally. As they get worn out. Ever watch an old person fade away? I have. Up close and personal. They regress.They get weaker. Stupider. And eventually...they are gone.

We...God help us all in light of our frailities...are the tip of the growth of Life here on earth. At the very least we are that on levels that we can perceive. And we are still growing. Like WEEDS. Look around at the young. It's right there to see if you have the eyes to do so.

It ain't over until the fat lady starts to get emaciated and stupid. And she is still singinging up a phat storm.

Got home from work last night at 2 a.m. Went into full-lotus. The magnetic field was stronger than usual from so many O at a Ds all day in full-lotus. I started having O at a Ds with my roommate's girlfriend. I thought this must be from the connection we've already made. Then she moved into the bathroom adjacent to my sleeping room and she stayed there for an hour in the bathtub. We just kept having O at a Ds and I exorcised all the stress from working late. At 3 a.m. I felt awesome and when I slept I had this AMAZING dream about these ecoanarchists (myself and friends from when I used to be listed in the Earth First! Journal as a contact back in 1994) involved in blowing up a parking ramp. This dream was based solely on reading just a HEADLINE from http://gnn.tv about two weeks ago. Then I realized the power of the subconscious -- how just a headline causing a strong emotional response can be stored in the brain as such amazing image experience. When I went into full-lotus this morning I realized that this experience was much like taking salvia and that my response was something like PTSD but that I processed it effectively.

fletcher said, "what's with the "the transhumanist/eugenic/electronic mind control part of the puzzle is missing here"

While I can't speak for Jeff, here's some forum mind control babble that's fairly up-to-date and has absolutely nothing to do with anything anywhere in reality.

From the forum:

"2008 brings us 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.'

Steven CIA Spielberg is using the same psy-ops template he has for ages to support USG agendas, propaganda to support military recruiting and counterpropaganda to obscure politically dangerous information.

Stereotypes of gender and race and sanctioned behaviors embedded in an idealized narrative form serve to condition young minds with attitudes that enable US government goals, especially a positive attutude towards joining the military to carry out a moral crusade in the name of either Christianity, Democracy, or both.

(If the rhetoric were any thicker, this paragraph would congeal.)

Spielberg's new movie's title focus on the keyword "Skull" is a way to use mass media fiction to dilute the reality of the dark history of the Yale uber-fraternity called 'Skull and Bones.'

The presidential election season of 2004 focused attention on this ugly group when it was realized that both candidates were members of this elite club which so well illustrates the illusion of American democracy. Ever since, pop media has been saturated with many other images of skull and bones for American kids to play with, especially Disney's (CIA for kidz!) racist, sexist, and militarist 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies.

(Actually I doubt anyone other than the para-political paranoiacs that scare themselves silly at conspiracy schizo wards even think about Skull and Bones. Fairly senseless to distract folk who aren't even looking. And if, in our attempts to make kinder, gentler zombies, we're going to exorcise skulls from our culture we mustn't forget the gazillion skulls doodled on arms and legs and backs by tattoo doodlers everywhere. Hmmmm....what will the army of uncreative & unoriginal "must get a tattoo" followers use to display their faux tough-guy-ness without those skulls? )

Saturating American culture with this death symbol also serves the purpose of desensitizing children to death at the same time they are being given camo-colored clothes to wear to normalize militarism, a style that might be called 'Blackwater Chic.'

(Gee, I'm old enough to remember when camo clothes first hit K-Mart fashionistas a few decades back. I seem to remember that the criticisms were much the same. Nice to see that paranoiacs, like old dogs, never seem to learn any new tricks.)

The use of the word "Crystal" has been used by Disney (CIA for kidz!) to embed in a young reader's mind the homonym created by the other pronunciation of the 'y' sound and getting instead "Christ" which evokes religious and moral themes.

(Ummmm....wouldn't they actually come up with Christ-al not Christ? Ah, the ever malleable idea of "proof." Proof, like beauty, is definitely in the eye of the beholder.)

This sublimal trick enables military recruiting since American war is marketed as religious war to the heavily-Christian American South where 50% of military recruits come from. This homonym device was used heavily in 'Atlantis: The Lost Empire' which was an early 2001 mirror of the invasion of the middle east planned by the Cheney White House long before 9/11/01. Spielberg's having put this word in the title phrase 'Kingdom of the Crystal...' makes this religious subliminal theme even stronger.

(Subliminals, eh? I love subliminals. Did my first high school speech on subliminals. Cribbed every fucking word from a High Times article about Wilson Bryan Key. Key loved the experiment done by Donald Vicary that supposedly increased Coke and popcorn sales at a movie theater.Still uses it as "proof." Trouble is Vicary....ummmmm....embellished his results. When called to repeat his experiment before the US Psychological Council and the FCC, both attempts were failures. When the location of the theater was finally pried from Vicary's lips, journalists discovered that his claims were a bit...how shall I say it...untrue. Vicary later admitted he had done no research. Another favorite is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's flashing of "Phone Now" 352 times during a Sunday night TV show. 500 viewers later wrote in to say they'd felt either hungry or thirsty. Oddly enough, no one phoned in though.

& Atlantis? I'd suggest to the PB&Js that the next time they plant their war-mongering subliminals in a cartoon, they should first ensure that the cartoon is at least watchable. How many drugs does one have to imbibe to actually sit through more than 10 minutes of that horrible horrible cartoon? Toy Story is a much better candidate. I see Buzz's initial attempt at flight as the perfect video precursor to the acrobatic flying skills of the Pentagon plane. Oh wait, that was a hologram. My blow.)

This is followed up with this comment framing a photo of Mylie Cyrus:

"Last summer I was taking my 4 and 7 year-old cousins for a walk along the river and I pointed out some warning signs up that had large skulls on them.

"You know what skulls mean, right guys?" I asked

"SKATEBOARDS!" was their gleeful reply.

For millennia the skull has implied death and danger to humans, now it's something to decorate girl's dresses.

(Now, what I find more abhorrent is the fact that the noble skull has sunk so low on the cool scale that it has been reduced to being worn by a no talent, cliche pimping, tweener automaton like Mylie Cyrus. Sad, truly sad.)

It will be kind of interesting to see how all the internet junkies and conspiracy hacks will handle "networking" and "truth seeking" when the electricity stops.They may have to actually share their feelings face to face with other humans instead of from behind a huge electronic buffer wall.

One can almost smell the stench of sweaty palms already.

And, should everything collapse, I bet mind control implant schizophrenics will be hard pressed to find a new cause for the voices in their heads without the ubiquitous guv-ment broadcasting 24/7.

All and all though, the writing has been stenciled in BIG BLACK BOLD capitol letters for a very long time. What does it say about the short-sightedness of humanity that we only start noticing the train hurtling towards us when its moments from hitting?

==============We now interrupt our regularly scheduled catastrophism for this announcement that everything is already solved, no laughter it's true--you perhaps fear it's true because, follow some links to see that when it comes down to it, it is up to you to accomplish the change. A tall order for altering the thought processes of catastrophism to catalyst. Aim for your participation instead of passivity.================

INSTEAD, what if we were "paralyzed by awe" by looking a bit to the side and seeing that everything is already solved?

Think about that.

Awed by the weighty consideration that it's our own lack of initiative that is to blame for the world's problems and nothing else?

Green the Middle East desert in 2 years. On no budget. Salt-pan for several thousand years, changed within 2 years to garden without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers or any extra water. (A short film on turning around worst case catastrophism scenarios of soil in the world, turning them into a (mycelium-rich) garden. The heavily salty desert around the even more heavily salty Dead Sea in Israel becomes a garden without pumping in extra water or artificial fertilizer/herbicides. "We could green the entire Middle East in this way," Geoff Lawton says in the film. [5 minute film link]http://commodityecology.blogspot.com/2007/06/6-soilsdirthydroponics.html

Stop soil erosion completely.

Water shortages gone.

No more sperm dieoff, or sperm whales since we could move away from mercury-laden coal quite easily.

No, some will say. Bring back my passive acceptance of catastrophism viewed from the easy chair, says the TV crowd...fascinated by the process because they have decided to fail (and Jeff, have you decided to fail your children?), instead of bring themselves out of their mutual morass...?

If there is such a strange collapse, it is solely a personal and collective decision of passivity to let it happen given all the solutions like diamonds in the rough that glint waiting for you.

Something I've harped on before:

The bioregional state and the commodity ecology in every watershed is designed to demote the crony raw material regimes of corrupt state elites that have criminally curtailed--by biased forms of unrepresentative legislation, unrepresentative formal institutional designs, and biased informal party gatekeeping--locally optimal choices in various materials.

The bioregional state argues that with so many technological solutions already in evidence though simply unapplied, it is unable to be said that there is a lack of solutions that is keeping sustainability from occurring or it is the fault of innate selfish ‘anthropocentrism’.

We are talking about a politics of technological repression--and passive acceptance that there is nothing to be done.

On the contrary, it is political, economic, and technological corruption and gatekeeping against the massive supermajorities of the world (see the polls) that is keeping us from sustainability.

Corruption and ambivalence is keeping us from living in representative democracies and maintaining a representative developmentalism.

This corruption and ambivalence keeps us living within crony raw material regimes instead of arrangements more democratic and consumer-choice driven that would look closer to the commodity ecology arrangement instead of commodity arrangements that destroy the planet.

In existing democracies many conflicts of interest keep unsustainability in place.

Only by creating additional formal 'ecological checks and balances' can we address these conflicts of interest and innately allow our political economies to be more directly 'in sync' with this global support for environmentalism, sound economics, and sound health practices.

To maintain and enhance biological and social diversity, a series of optimized institutions help local populations formulate the priorities of their own local ecological self-interest.

These bioregional commonwealth institutions of the bioregional state follow this definition:

Bioregional democracy (or the bioregional state) is a series of electoral reforms and commodity reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g. water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names—all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.

These additional ecological checks and balances provide solutions for the formal, informal, and ecological corruption interactions generating the ongoing developmental cronyism of consumptive consolidation and environmental degradation. From the book:

This is a wholly novel ecological approach to democratic political theory and the purposes and responsibilities of democratic states. It is a wholly novel formal institutional design concept for how to achieve sustainability. It involves asking what was unfortunately left out of Enlightenment democratic theorizations, and it involves asking what are the other formal prerequisites for an age of sustainability. It means joining our sense of formal institutions and environmentalism as interrelated instead of unrelated topics. The significance of the bioregional state is that it is the first attempt to analyze sustainability or unsustainability as the outcome of the way formal democratic institutions are organized. Most environmentalists and academics entirely lack the vocabulary to discuss this.

First, in terms of what Enlightenment theorists neglected, different formal institutions of democracy always are involved in different informal political and environmental contexts which have been left under-theorized as to their interactions with the formal institutional frameworks. These three factors of formal institutions, informal politics, and environmental contexts should instead be considered holistically as one piece in the bioregional state, instead of simply concentrating on a biased approach that only analyzes formal institutions by themselves.

Otherwise, only formally degradation states which facilitate and underwrite informal politics of environmental degradation can result because existing formal institutions are based on ignoring and denying these innate interconnections.

Second, following from this, I would argue that on these informal political and environmental factors that influence all formal states, existing democracies are innately biased on levels of formal design by informal political interests toward expanding environmental degradation and ignoring citizen input from particular geographic areas that aim to re-prioritize state politics toward more sustainable developmental paths. Formal institutional biases are what are maintaining an informal politics of environmental degradation [Whitaker 2005, xi].

The bioregional state would bring the state institutions ‘in sync’ with such an ecological self-interest:

Toward A Bioregional State is a novel approach to development and to sustainability. [The bioregional state] proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, [or getting “ideologies right”,] an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically “out of sync”. I argue that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.

The sustainability politics of the ecological self-interest of people is indeed already here, as seen in polls showing supermajorities worldwide supporting such a view, based on how they think their states are currently performing illegitimately in the face of environmental challenges.

Not all people are passive, Jeff, from US polls at least right now 80% are angry and ready for change instead of ambivalent.

Supermajorities of the world are in agreement already on environmental issues. A supermajority of the world considers their current forms of state doing poorly on getting to sustainability. This would be a good basis to achieve what the bioregional state promotes: green constitutional engineering to get to sustainability.

We are beyond arguing about ‘converting’ people to green thinking, with the majority of the world already green.

The problematic is more clearly defined as a form of ‘gray’ political economy against a population already gone green.

The horrible message I have for us is that anything bad that happens now is our own fault.

When the Sleeper awakens, you will be surprised what can be accomplished. And that Sleeper is perhaps you.

Dream up what you could do in your watershed if you treated the physical world at least as half as important as the time spent looking at digital bits of an anonymous internet.

Hey G.G. Ghoul-- that clicking sound you heard coming from the bathroom-- that was your roomate's girlfriend LOCKING herself in to get away from your creepy lecherous full-lotus position. Your mother may be right to be concerned about you. And how old are you anyway? Cause you spend waaay too much time at McDonalds and the mall for an adult.

seriously.and right on mark.You hit the nail into the bioregional coffin.Thank you.I think we all agree at least that there ARE solutions, hell, boatloads of em, it's just that there aren't enough people who understand that it's up to THEM to make this change, too many people who care more about instant gratification and cheese to ever give a damn. Not to mention the predator class who would never allow what you suggest as a solution. Most humans are too lazy, in the west to do what you suggest too. Unfortunately.That's the realism of the catostrophic viewpoint of current developments. Sure is pretty, that mushroom cloud over there...

Do we require permission? Second, perhaps a modus vivendi will come out of all this....elites exist--the question if whether they are forced to be representative or are psychopathic as their systemic corrupt drift moves them toward.

Anyway back to the presumed laziness or ambivalence: check out the polls. I think you are referring only to the cheerless downer cow digital ambiance of RI instead of outside.

Even if Fulford's spiel is untrue, if legitimation is a major factor in our degradative capitalist corporatist states, that legitimation is already gone. People are milling around for ideas, though they are already on the path toward this I think just by acting for themselves worldwide in their areas.

The last groups to see what is going on are those outside what is going on...

Oh just one more. Waking up neighbors I'm sure with screams of joy! Hot damn! Thank you Ireland:

a review of what will transmogrify Europe into a de-localized, centralized state that has the power to even prorogue Parliaments and other Assemblies in its 'member' nations. Only the Irish have a referendum vote. The French voted 'non' on it, though then puppet Sarkozy, put in via vote fraud, pushed it through the French legislature against the French people's vote down on the issue! High criminal elites make for a very criminal EU state. The EU is a MAJOR piece of the future elite global surveillance transnational corporate de-democratized fascist state. This is a nice institutional summary of what the Irish are voting on that will decide something important to the world's future....After reading all these powers that the EU will take away from people and away from local democracy, how can anyone support the EU rationally? How can anyone think they are progressive or democratic while being EU supporters is beyond me...

Though of course the criminals will just ram it through via parliamentary makeovers in Ireland similar to how they ignored how the people spoke against it in Netherlands and France. Criminals don't take no for an answer. Though they are setting up a huge backlash of this unelected directorate.

And it's hardly only Europe going fascist. the North American reich of the NAU is still in process here:

Title: Toward a North American Union: a history of 35 years of corrupt elite scheming for NAUAuthor: The August Review: Global Elite Research CenterDate: 2006.09.24 07:10Description: The global elite, through the direct operations of President George Bush and his Administration, are creating a North American Union that will combine Canada, Mexico and the U.S. into a superstate called the North American Union (NAU). The NAU is roughly patterned after the European Union (EU). There is no political or economic mandate for creating the NAU, and unofficial polls of a cross-section of Americans indicate that they are overwhelmingly against this end-run around national sovereignty. The reality over appearance is easily cleared up with a proper historical perspective of the last 35 years of political and economic manipulation by the same elite who now bring us the NAU....This paper will explore this history in order to give the reader a complete picture of the NAU, how it is made possible, who are the instigators of it, and where it is headed....It is important to first understand that the impending birth of the NAU is a gestation of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, not the Congress. This is the topic of the first discussion below...

"ON 3rd JULY 2003, the European Food Supplements Directive was passed into English Law, which will, over the next few years, effectively ban around 5000 discrete products currently legal to sell in health food shops and pharmacies. This Directive has been devised and pushed forward by the unelected EU bureaucrats in order to "harmonize" the selling of health supplements throughout the EU, and was railroaded through the British Parliament by the Blair Government despite being rejected by the House of Lords. The way that the Government passed it was outrageous: just before the vote by the Standing Committee in the House of Commons, five Labour MPs who were going to vote against it were replaced by more obedient MPs. Even then, this directive was only passed by 8 votes to 6!

"So it seems that the European Parliament and the present UK Government are determined to pass the Food Supplements Directive despite the will of the people and even of MPs themselves. Why? Because it is the will of the EU Parliament which is very strongly influenced by the massive pharmaceutical companies in Europe. They are the only ones that will financially gain from the destruction of the health supplement industry. After all, people who take responsibility for their own health by taking supplements need less drugs because they are healthier.

"It is ironic that the Malnutrition Advisory Group has recently released a report showing that about 2 million people in the UK(!), including 60% of hospital patients, are not getting adequate nutrition and they admit that this is severally affecting their health and ability to heal. Of course, they don't mention supplements because they are still under the false and dangerous impression that this fictitious thing called a "well-balanced diet" exists that can adequately supply all the nutrients that the body needs. Of course, there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support this; in fact, the research actually indicates that modern food production and processing techniques, cooking methods and pollution levels guarantee that it is well-nigh impossible for anyone to get the nutrients they need for optimum health on a "well-balanced diet". (And if you can't get optimum nutrition using ingredients from the supermarket, how on earth are you going to find it in a disgusting NHS hospital slop canteen!) Given this terrible state of modern nutrition, it is astonishing that our governments are trying to move legislation towards a vastly reduced availability of nutritional supplements. What is going on?

"Many of us have been protesting about these proposals for the past five years, writing letters to our MPs and MEPs, signing million signature petitions and even marching on Parliament here in London. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a democracy where the will of the people is the driving factor of legislation. The EU Parliament is not interested in personal freedom, or even personal health… only control and more control. And they have tried to justify this assault on our rights to take supplements on the grounds of our safety, even though health supplements have a safety record second to none — see LaLeva's Safety of Dietary Supplements and Comparative Safety Graph. And given their incredible safety, it is rather odd that the tabloid newspapers have been running sensational headlines over the past few years on the dangers of nutritional supplements. (I wonder who is behind those media campaigns?)

"Already, the supplement market in Germany and Norway are severely controlled, and it is illegal, for example, to buy Vitamin C over 200mg in strength because it is considered by Brussels to be unnecessary, although of course, it is very necessary for the population to continue to buy cigarettes and alcohol as they are very healthy for governments' bank accounts. I have just heard (10/3/04) from a very reliable source that a woman has been arrested in France for selling 500mg tablets of Vitamin C because in that country doses of that strength are now considered medicinal! (There is absolutely no safety issue with Vitamin C and you can freely buy 1000mg tablets here in the UK and US at the moment… I take 3 a day.) Soon, these sorts of controls will be pan-European, and you will only be able to buy from a small and bland list of ineffective, inorganic supplements and in doses that the EU diktat considers appropriate. Many innovative products and companies will simply disappear, and it will become much harder for each of us to take responsibility for our health."

And so the WTO's Codex would 'harmonize' disharmoniously with current U.S., Canadian, and many other countries in the Western Hemisphere's more locally representative laws that benefit the consumer health freedom access to vitamins and minerals--forcing all countries internationally involved in the WTO to remove their pro-consumer and health freedom access legislation, like the EU.

Below are links to two interesting short documentaries about the current invasive, consumer repressive despotism of Codex Alimentarius, supposedly to be institutionalized across multiple nations by 2009. [and how to get out of it]

The multiple autonomous pressures from below are gelling despite inured ambivalent catastrophism seen in the somewhat threadbare threads of RI. As Wayne Madsen noted:

"As the Bretons and Corsicans will soon discover with Sarkozy, [bio-]regional [representative] nationalism is anathema to the globalist neo-con agenda, particularly the international bankers who want strong centralized control and minimal devolution of power to local and regional governments. [The EU would have banned one-country only parties. Some freedom to choose.] The electoral malfeasance of neo-cons in manipulating elections in France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, and other countries will remain a problem until the people, acting through the power of progressive, anti-globalist, and anti-capitalist governments, seize control, via whatever means necessary, of the media, the voting and vote counting process, and the opinion polling mechanisms."

Your post reminds me of how fortunate the Amish and their faith in this Christ Jesus is. They do not need a Social Security card since they have proved they can take care of their own. So they are somewhat out of the matrix in this way. No number. No Social Security tax to pay either. They are never drafted to fight in country because of this faith they have in a messiah god. You and I will never see an Amish family in any court in the United States because they believe that we the "false brethren" need to be avoided in any conflict and forgiven. No matter how difficult it may be to do so. So they do not clutter up the court system with lawsuits and the like. Much to the delight of the judges. They have a reputation for being responsible, able, and functional people making some of us outsiders jealous and left dreaming of better days.

Yeah it is unfortunate that they believe in a creator and experience the peace of mind and purpose that the ancient writings taken from the Holy Bible affords them. It is too bad for us that they are set apart from our establishment and are honored because of it by the same. And this is all reality because they have the nerve to believe in a God that in existentialist terms brings permanent peace of mind in all situations imaginable. If things get considerably worse for us the Amish will still be farming and taking care of their own as they always have done. Do you think that it is wrong that they have found this kind of happiness alive in our electronic world? I know for most of us the answer is NO.

and, they get to rape their sisters without recourse from the world of convention. it's comforting to know that when the conventional world withers, we can rely on the amish to carry on the time-honored tradition of sister rape. glory be and hallelujah.

@Arthur Gilroy: Evolution may not be done with us yet. But it might be next week. Just because our own shining intellect came forth along a relatively smooth curve (I mean, one at least connected to other bioforms and responsive to the slow changes of the Mother) doesn't mean the next will.

Somewhere, something might be growing silvery hairs from secret superchips as the codeforms inside enter states of superchange, opening channels of awareness through unsuspected pathways.

This might be, after all, our purpose - to gestate the next necessary step taken by Mind on Earth. We're tiny - our individual memories and lives will be recorded well enough in the patterns of the universe without the need for our having a soul or any other epitaph to existence.

@Mark - Just so long as you keep your clever hands off my lightbulbs. I'm all for sustainable, efficient technological growth, but if it's administered in a 'democratic' fashion I want nowt to do with it.

I think we're just being a bit hopeful to think it really matters whether or not we avoid major ecological and economic collapses this swing of the warconomy pendulum. We've holographed our technology and hardened our control layers to the point where reboot is near inevitable even following a big-time wipeout (and can't we all think of so many delicious elements of that crash scene, eh?).

This time, the 'seed-stock' peasants left over after Ragnarok won't be so damn useless. They'll be sustaining just as big a life-extended elite population as today, with no need for the weeping masses Mother Teresa grew like a boil on to chew leather and drive oxen and manufacture Learjets.

And they'll be easy to control - just look at the weapons tech we developed! Nobody's throwing away those blueprints. Or the machinery to make them. Plague is a great respecter of machinery.

It's the Thousand Villages future - technological sustainable cottage-industry space programs and we'll all turn into elves...at least, those within the control layer will.

The rest of us? We'll believe we were the lucky ones, the smart ones. And we'll pay that tribute to the hidden kings still, believing it to be free trade between free peoples.

I don't think Western Parliamentery All-Thing style 'Democracy' is ever going to be a tool for freedom. I think, if we do keep developing after this period, we'll be finding governmental principles much closer to the mathematical relationships that govern modern information flow management (network architecture, interlocking multipurpose protocols, flow management trees, other stuff I didn't do in school). Management, be it environmental or social, will be fluid and situational, authority levels and structures rising and falling to meet needs and desires.

Like I said, as long as you keep your hands off my lightbulbs, my firewood, my tax-free local economies, my freedom to use my resources how I and my neighbours see fit.

I do see local armament being a big part of localizing government, but not in a Paul Revere fight-for-a-symbol way. More in a 'sorry, all decisions are made by the local folks now' way.

I don't know if we'll need to worry about all that. The children we appear likely to sire will not spring from our loins, but fully-formed from our forebrains.

And, like Athena, they will be shining with silver and wiser than their pappy.

I bet we get more than a splitting headache during labour, though. We be lucky if we get to be fertilizer - organic may become a bit archaic. Or we may prove useful, the few of us required for technical services in the Garden living our brutish short lives just as today.

Or maybe we will all turn into elves, and live in floating cities that gather their water from the dews of dawn and float fruitfully along the ley-lines their hydrosilicate crystal spines are drawn to.

But if you want to 'force the political process' to respect some set of artificially constructed needs, to my mind you're just Al Gore painted a different shade of green.

@Fishheads - Tell me more.

@Ghoulie - I hope Chunky Pringprong is paying you for this. Not in a secret mixture of prostate exudate and sheep come, either.

Hmf. While I'm feeling surly, and the topic of 'nutritional supplements' is right there in front of me (I think it was a Mark post), I gotta sound off there too.

I worked once for a few months shipping that stuff - everything from bottles of aloe juice to big jars of mine tailings cough I mean mineral supplements to bloody stupid homeopathic crap to the stuff in the 'janitor's closet (near-steroid protein-chain crap illegal in Canada - big sellers to dumb bodybuilders who hate their own kidneys and livers!).

IMHO, whatta f&*^%$g scam. 90% of that stuff is garbage and worse. Most of those 'vitamin supplements' are not only made under conditions a glue factory would frown on (or IN a glue factory), but are rigged with such massive doses that users suffer deficiency disorders without them because their damn bodies have not only quit making the compounds in question but are often being damaged just trying to excrete the excess.

As for stupid garbage like the 'natural estrogens' in magical black cohosh (FAST ticket to reproductive cancer - news flash, chemicals that resemble your body's control hormones are DANGEROUS) or the godawfully stupid 'a little of what reminds me of what you claim ails you' homeopathic "method" or the damaging, inedible soy proteins in 'dietary supplements'...god, it goes on.

You want ascorbic acid? Eat a damn lime. Or some red meat. Or any number of other things. You want trace minerals? Go have a salad at the damn pub. Don't put olestrasoy on it. You want to be sick for the rest of your suddenly expensive life? Go talk to the 'nutritionist' (aaaahahaahaa) behind the counter of your local 'health' store. As if you can buy your health.

@Fletcher - It was you that was mailing DVDs and the like around, wasn't it?

Now I pop on my news sites and there on Mike Rivero's slightly suspect yet always entertaining front page is an article about some public persona calling for the old rat-a-tat upon just such disc-mailing 'traitors'. And getting away with it, too. How very Early Third Reich that is. Get some public idiot to do the crimes you're trying to legitimize by calling them out of the woodwork with the Wurlitzer.

A federal judge who acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos today called for an investigation of his own conduct.

Alex Kozinski, 57, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asked a court ethics panel to initiate the proceedings after The Times reported Wednesday that he posted lewd photos and videos on his personal website.

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as “funny” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski is one of the nation’s highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.

@E.T. Post Here: Ah! The "Giant Link" technique. I just like to make people cut-and-paste mine. Your way is kind of the best and worst - a huge cut-and-paste combined with the ease of a link.

Hmf. Bet it's all cover for comms with the Third Alternative rehabilitated Nazi base-cum elite hideout, this spacevertising thing. Plus it'll be a fine excuse for the fake saucer attacks. Won't we feel the big dummies.

and learning how to best cushion the crash of our coddled urban lives.

I am hoping you will be able to make some connection between our being on the eve of collapse and how venal and morally bankrupt and oblivious so many people have become, even more so than was the case previously.

I suppose there's no point in being bitter and full of resentment about it, but one would hope we humans in the so-called developed world could aspire to something better in the eleventh hour before it all falls apart, than frantically devoting ourselves to demonstrating just how much we're bringing it down on ourselves. There are times when I really feel like I'm living in an episode of "The Simpsons".

You're a piece of shit, gotta play it safe around electricity. Come on over to Lancaster, Pa. and us Amish folk will show you a good ass-whooping, you degenerate, fork-tongued scalawag. We don't rape our sisters, you trash-mouthed, impudent provocateur. The sex we have with our sisters is perfectly consensual and sanctioned by the one and only. I curse you, you blasphemous abomination, and pray that God casts you deep into the bowels of fiery hell where you will burn relentlessly for eternity. Asshole.

Lord Reptor,The scenerio you put forthwith the elves and the idea that "our individual memories and lives will be recorded well enough in the patterns of the universe without the need for our having a soul or any other epitaph to existence."seemed to really resonate. Well said. I don't mean to single this one statement out, but thanks for putting it that way. I kind of disagree though. I think the soul is logical. Gawd I'm a backwards Amishlover. and while I agree that Lightbulbs are greatand the Glucosamine Chondroitin Shark Pussy extracts are bullshit and "we'll pay that tribute to the hidden kings"I'm still going to be a traitor i suppose, shot or not shot. so..Mike Rivero?I gotta youtube that...

The photoshoppery of Jeff Wells is pretty decent, isn't it?I mean this one would make a freaking awesome poster in my bunker.

@Fletcher: As usual, my thoughts on further purpose post-meatbag are more than merely bifurcated.

Last spring, I uncovered a little succulent on the stone stairs to the veg patch. It almost came away with the weeds covering the stairs, and I nearly trod it to bits over and over again after that.

It didn't do much, spread a bit. Green and pretty.

Then, in the early winter, it flowered, small pretty white flowers on long slim stalks , well above the plant. Most of the flowers went to shit in the bad weather, but a few stayed stuck on their stalks.

Much, much later, clearing for this spring, I found those flowers. They had turned from white to grey-blue and hardened and curled into what looked like little Chinese paper lanterns.

The wind took them as though they weren't attached to anything at all and whirled them out of my sight like baby spiders.

@Fletch again: Be all kinds of rebel, by all means. It's probably fun. Just watch your back and know when to pack it in and move along. At low levels, you get the gulag.

At high levels, you get used like a dink-sock.The Lenin story is meant to be instructional for would-be postmodern rebels. Always a damn ice-pick when you don't expect it, should you try to keep the big boys out.

Not that I think the Lenin story is true. I think Michael Chertoff is one hell of a ringer for a 150-year-old Lenin. But then I like to think odd things.

Thanks Reptor, though"fun" probably isn't the first adjective that comes to my mind when being a "rebel".I get more of of a sense of satisfaction, I guess from being somewhat active in the arena of what you could call the movement...anything that points to the occult crime syndacate/ globalist scum underbelly and sheds light on what most people ignore or don't have the vocabulary to discuss, any small (no matter how small..and that implies that there is So much to do) effort, even if it's making amaturish logos for truth movement Tshirts, bumper stickers, sending dvds to troops in Iraq, marching in war protests...it's all about that feeling that I can live with myself for me. Like i have to do something. And while I see alot of people saying, be careful, don't get shot or lose touch with reality and friends, I see just the opposite happening. And I'm learning. I have grown so much as a human being, caring more about global issues and my fellow man when i see that there are beautiful people out there who devote their time to helping out.I feel like most people don't take it that far though. If more people did, who knows what could happen.Probably nothing.Alex Jones is still alive.Maybe the Truth isn't that dangerous after all and i really don't need to watch my back as you say.I never feel afraid.Unless I'm driving through a tornado. But that's another story for my blog.I have friends who are consumed by the Waco story and by Tim Mcveih and still obsess over squibs (which have been accepted as de-bunked by most here @ RI I think though if you really watch the video you can see them going off just like a controlled demolition, by the way.)But I just participate in doing what gets near the bare minimum. I'm not that much of a rebel.I am way too busy LIVING, I suppose. working, having a relationship, friends, family (gram just went into the Nursing Home)to be that involved.That's the way it is for the average joe I bet. So no worries mate.back toJeff's post, and the impendingdoom of "civilizations" makes me want to believe in your (?) scenerio of silver ghost in the shell children, forests of asure and all that...but how realistic are either of you being?I think it's definitely a mix of the two,: widespread de-population, mind-control, slavery and darkness and on the other side unbelievable wonder.But who gets to experience the New Golden Dawn and who gets to be the face on which said boot stomps on forever?

@Fletcher yet again: Can't have fun if you're not satisfied. Always fun to do something fulfilling. So I bet it is fun rebeling around. Probably not paid much though, the rebel thing, I guess.

Doubt if you'd get shot or even gulagged for mouthing off about 9/11 and Gladio and paperboy-humpery and...jeez, it is a long list, innit?

Not at this point in whatever curve we're on. More likely just a good coppy beatdown every now and then. Maybe a taser to the nipples in the station elevator.

Still, watch out for talk show hosts. Seems they're stone killers these days.

On the third hand (always handy), you might like to have a Big Red Button for both your storage media and your social arrangements. Curves steepen so fast sometimes.

If you don't have software ugly enough to brick your drive faster than the door comes down, a big old radar magnet is just the thing. Keep the screws off your casing - trouble knocks, just pop that puppy on top of the drive and reboot for extra spin.

Can't find the net lectures I got my kill code from no more, and not surprising. Haven't tried it, either. Sorta like leaning killing moves in judo - you don't really get a chance to see if you've got it right.

But if I can get dragged to the van for a bunch of rare Hendrix and bootleg Carl Sagan tapes, so be it. I'd never wipe my wonderful jewels anyway. Hell, I'm gonna get more storage and back it up for future generations. Go ahead and arrest me for it. I'll just tell other people to do it in court.

Jeez, looka what judges download anyway. No need to holograph the kind of unoriginal and useless filth our social betters keep for secrets. Nice treasures, ya old creeps.

Hmmm... where was I going here? No idea.

I thought the photoshop was pretty good too. I felt it perhaps was intended to depict the Fortean-researcher equivalent of a World-of-Wankcraft addict, wired and watching in the wrong direction while shit eats up his town.

Opinions?

Back to my dough (which is awfully slow on this wintry sunny day),Lord Reptor.

ok, the picture and the Nick cave quote together...that's what I'm talking about.what Is the relationship?the civilizations burning behind the child faced person reading how to be a detective as the the cities already exploding and giant jelly alien mollusks are holographing overheadand "Half the people had turned into squealing pigs, the other half were cooking"seems like a jab at the readers and bloggers of RI. but I could be having delusions of grandeur.squeeling like a pig,fletcher.

Hi Dan: I just followed the book "Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality" -- for diet and everything else. Inner ear energy is the kidney energy increasing and opening up the brain channels. It's good to combine the full-lotus with small universe, active exercise. You came up in my meditation last night so obviously there's still some connection. I just use mint listerine for anti-septic. Cheaper and does the job! haha. All the best, drew

@Fletcher: Live? No, I have Ladyland on vinyl and a bunch of stuff from Stora Salen and the Black Gold disc and a buncha other stuff (even tapes, my God), but I didn't even know there was a live version of that tune recorded.

Shows what I know.

The thing I can't find and would give a finger-joint for is a bunch of bootlegs I used to have on cassette in the early 80's. I think it was on Jet records and it had a track on it called 'Hey Leroy'. Jimi wasn't on vocals and the Experience was not in the building - it's some pre-London stuff, and I can only ever hear it in my head. Not avec Little Richard, either - totally different, and a Jimi I have only heard echoes of in his later work - a different guitar and a different style.

If you know where to get THAT, I'll cook you dinner and even dance for you.

Lying about the dancing,Lord Reptor.

P.S. - Back to the photoshop - the flying things look more like skin mites or fleas or something this time. A bit skullish, too. I guess we're all serving up a big garmonbozia for them as we dichotomize and dualize and persecute one another in an endless daisy-chain of butt-plugging and throat-slitting warconomic self-exploitation.

All of which detective-boy's eyes are wired Clockwork-Orange style to avoid as he learns how to find out secrets from a cheap pop source....

Ooh, and don't forget the pyramid.

My favourite pyramids are the ones in Pohl & Kornbluth's incredible novel Wolfbane. They're machines that use organic components harvested from convenient worlds they come across. Earth is ripped from her orbit and dragged through space by their world, cooling and dying under an ever-dwindling artificial sun as her people are used up one by one by the machines, who are viewed religiously.

Ah -- you got me Lord! Thanks for the "denatured" heads-up. Didn't realize it might be methanol causing blindness. So I'll switch back to peppermint spirits and tea tree oil! haha. Hey -- so aspartame is ALSO methanol -- and shit aspartame is in ALL the "breath freshening" products, including those listerine breath strips.....

Fully 11% of aspartame is methanol-- 1,120 mg aspartame in 2 L diet soda, almost six 12-oz cans, gives 123 mg methanol (wood alcohol). If 30% of the methanol is turned into formaldehyde, the amount of formaldehyde is 18 times the USA EPA limit for daily formaldehyde in drinking water, 2 mg in 2 L water.

Actually I HAD read this Cecil Adam's column on the subject -- the STRAIGHT DOPE (I've read his whole book before as well -- excellent stuff!). So maybe listerine does NOT contain methanol....and I was "drinking" the Walgreens' equivalent anyway....didn't seem to good for my eyes or internal organs though. haha. I knew this was due to the thymol and menthol, etc. that Cecil Adam's ends his column with... killing a dude after drinking 3 bottles of the shit. Here's Cecil Adams:

"Specially denatured alcohol" such as that used in Listerine receives less radical treatment, although some SDA formulas do contain methyl (wood) alcohol, which if ingested often or copiously enough can cause blindness, organ damage, and death.

Listerine presumably is free of such toxins (which is not to say it's entirely safe, a matter we'll return to), though its manufacturer, Pfizer, declined to confirm exactly what form of SDA it does contain. However, my consultant Bibliophage, a resourceful fellow, deduces that Pfizer uses SDA formula 38-B as defined in the Code of Federal Regulations, since said formula is the only one listed that may include eucalyptol, menthol, methyl salicylate, and thymol, all of which are named as active ingredients on the Listerine label. Impress your buddies in the Dumpster with that."

OK there's the "microcosmic orbit" and then the "macrocosmic orbit." Once you master the microcosmic orbit then the full-lotus turns into the macrocosmic orbit through yin-yang energy exchanges or what I call "O at a Ds." So that's why the small universe is crucial as well. All the best, drew

Well Santiago's point to me was that you can get your ass kicked in the spirit world -- so to speak. Mahayana Buddhism (read Master Nan, Huai-chin) is about spirit travel so that you can survive even cosmic catastrophes. This is the paradox of "different levels of emptiness." The Dgochzen (or sp?) -- as per the excellent book CIVILIZED SHAMANS -- is actually more closer to the Bon lineage -- or at least the Dgozzzchen is rejected by some of the Tibetan schools.

OK I just finished the mind-boggling book "Mediumship and Survival" (1983) by Alan Gauld -- a parapsychologist Ph.D. So Western parapsychology has been obsessed with the concept of immortal individuality -- as is the West hang-up - and the book tries to examine this obsession in contrast to what it calls "super ESP" which is more like the Buddhist concept of rebirth.

Again to bring it back to the "getting your ass kicked in the spirit world" metaphor -- the CONCEPT of nondualism is just that -- a left-brain philosophy. Left-brain mind yoga is, again, a WESTERN obsession (as per the "What is Enlightenment" scene). Nondualism in Vedanta is DEPENDENT on the caste-system -- so that you can be vegetarian (protected by the warrior class); have no contact with females; and then literally kill yourself, causing all physical and mental afflications to automatically resonate past your physical self. The book "Talks with Ramana Maharshi" details how he achieved eternal liberation only AFTER his heart stopped for over 10 minutes and then restarted again. That took him 9 years and this blatant detail, the key to his "eternal liberation" is REPRESSED by even his followers. I studied his rare books straight from his ashram and then asked his followers on their internet listserve about this issue. It was denied. Both Goodman and H.W.L. Poonja state that there's only 6 people on the planet who actually achieve "eternal liberation" as any one time -- it's a very specific and rare accomplishment.

I just finished the amazing book MIRACLES (1982) by D. Scott Rogo, another parapsychologist who also specialized in "psychic music," the basis for my meditation model. Anyway D. S. Rogo details how St. Teresa de Avila also basically killed herself -- her stigmata included a fissure on her heart that she knew the location was. I think it was her right side -- just as Ramana Maharshi says it's the right side of the heart which is the secret to eternal liberation. Teresa wasn't the only westerner to do this through mind yoga -- and those that did ALSO achieved BILOCATION, just like Ramana Maharshi -- the creation of another physical body.

So the left-brain mind yoga is called "the direct path" because it's not based on spirit travel into the cosmos but rather goes directly to the source of the body as pure consciousness -- the same source for the whole universe. But again the left-brain yoga is dependent on training in specific religious conditions and does not utilize spiritual paranormal powers as the means of creating a "safe" space for healing, health and happiness.

Either way the MEANS -- the useful means -- is actually based on natural resonance. The left-brain mind yoga or inference of the I-thought, is LISTENING which then resonates the vagus nerve to the heart through ultrasound ionization. The right-brain body yoga is the vagus nerve to the stomach. Both left-brain and right-brain yoga rely on sublimating the sex energy -- but the right-brain yoga does it through interaction with the world as tantra. That's why science is actually tantra, the external path, whereas PURE LOGIC, is the source of both right-brain shamanism and science. Pure logic is the LOGOS, listening to the source of sound through complementary opposite numbers. Buddhism is not humanism and Master Nan, Huai-chin states that one of the most important conceptual Buddhist questions is why humans were created in the first place. So the Bushmen trance healing relies on music and tantra and has the same powers as Taoism and Buddhism, etc. -- but it was the dominant culture from 10,000 BCE to 80,000 BCE. Yet BEFORE that humans -- going back millions of years -- were still not bipedal -- were still living in trees, eating mainly LEAVES, and relying on sound as the dominance perception. Even when primates started relying on FRUIT -- the "forbidden" fruit -- the primates became agressively territorial (gibbons). Fruit is a limited resource that is high energy. Meat even more so -- and with meat, female chimps began using spears for hunting so the females chimps wouldn't have to be raped. And so began the early forms of tantra -- the secret science of sublimated sexual energy. Hopefully Professor Chris Knight's forthcoming book "The Human Conspiracy" (Cambridge U Press) will have some new juicy details.

Seriously: I have long contemplated all of this, and I still contemplate it -- otherwise I would not be reading your blog, Jeff (which I love). And maybe, probably, it's true that we're witnessing the end of a civilization. Maybe the end of life on earth. Nevertheless, though I do not like most of his viewpoints at all, I have never forgotten the words of Martin Luther which I once saw on a church board in Germany in 1989 (the year the Wall came down, when I was an exchange student there, saw the whole thing happening, felt the uncertainty, the weirdness, much then as it is today): "Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree today."

So I walk in my garden and I throw sticks for my dog. I go to work and I read, read, read I pay attention and I do what I can. But you are so right when you say that we must pay attention to home matters. After all I may die in a car crash before the world ends. And maybe we're all wrong and it'll be okay somehow... maybe.

Anyway, it ain't over til it's over.

Thanks for all you've done, Jeff. I pledge to keep planting my apple trees, even on the morning that the sun rises over green fields for the last time.

Don't forget about the Hendrix boot 'I Woke Up This Morning And Found Myself Dead.

Hendrix &Johnny Winter & a very drunken Jim Morrison bellowing "Fuck her in the ass! Fuck her in the ass!"to a blues vampas he slowly slides down onto the stagemumbling incoherentlyin a drunken stupor.

Hendrix takes the mikeand says,laughing,"For any of you who don't knowthat's Jim Morrison."

@FailureFear Again: Hmm, I bet I misread you. Looking at things another way, I agree - watching everything happen definitely seems to be a primary interest.

It's just on this board, where nothing ever happens and breath is always bated, the term 'event' is generally loaded. We're all waiting for something conclusive to happen. CyberDawn for me, immortal awakening using easily purchased household products for G, Anonymouse wants to be a real boy - I think a lot of us are hoping for some UFOs or Maitreyas - whatever. I expect you know what I mean.

But yeah, the ongoing neverending Main Event - well, whether through agency or accident, here we are and obviously in some decent seats - look at these eyes, these hands!

Wonder what the nosebleed section of life is like. Planet-sized brains and twenty-thousand-year orgasms? (at just lightyears of distance, 3G, LIGHTYEARS)

That's what I'm talking about. This reminds me of a "conversation" I had with this dude a couple weeks ago. I was sitting in full-lotus, and had an "O at a D" with this chick across the street, while I was reading or eating or something.

So the dude is on his cell phone and with an Indian accent, looking Indian, says that he's vegetarian (he's eating Chinese).

He's right next to me and starts talking about me -- "sitting in full-lotus in a chair?" "Should he be doing that? " "He's staring." "Should he be doing that?"

So he hangs up with his friend and I turn to him and say:

"You're from Dehli right? New Dehli?"

He's shocked.

"How did you know?"

So I come out of my full-lotus trance and realize that I had recognized his accent as the same as the lady I know who works at my bank -- and she's from New Dehli -- so my "consciousness" had made that connection without me acknowledging the reason why. I just intuitively knew the answer.

I explain that to him -- and to myself as well!!

That's what I'm talking about.

So the New Delhi dude brags how hotel rooms cost $600 a night now! I exclaim surely there's cheaper rooms in New Dehli.

We chat a bit more -- he states how he just got his MBA from Carlson School of Management....

Ah... India. 40 million middle class (out of 1 billion people) and how spiritual it is to have a cell phone, be transcontinental, vegetarian .... and a business degree.

Such a spike would mimic the conditions of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, which came as close as anything has to eradicating all life on Earth

Rigorous my arse.

To suggest that the Permian Extinction was caused by a six degree temperature rise is just goofy.

Thats the thing about this blog.

For all the talk about how smart and discriminating the Rigorous Intuition folks are, blah blah blah, the place is just a waste of time energy sink that offers zero real insight,does no productive work and as no goal.

What caused the long dying seems to a complex operation as to what happened. The root cause was the Siberian Traps. They belched lava and carbon dioxide over nearly a million years. The amount of lava they belched has no parallel. Not even the Deccan Traps come close. The important part was the CO2 though. It apparently was enough to warm the planet 5 degrees C above what it was already: which was already warmer than now by a considerable bit (a few degrees C).

From there, the oceans warmed. This had two effects. The oceans of the Permian seem to have been very stratified. That is to say that the oceans did not intermix from the bottom depths to the ocean surface. There were very distinct layers. Additionally, as the world warmed, the ice caps melted. This decreased the salinity of the top waters and made the stratification worse. This caused the bottom of the ocean to be anoxic (ie very little or no oxygen dissolved in the various layers). The warming made the anoxic conditions worse. Warm water holds less oxygen than does cold. Life in the water would be...less than comfortable. With the melting of the very extensive ice caps, the oceans would rise and the anoxic layers would be brought up to depths that would originally have been habitat for the Permian marine organisms (This is Hallam's regression-transgression-anoxia theory).

Then the warmed ocean unleashes a nasty surprise for the surface and atmosphere: we get methane hydrate burps. There is a large amount of methane sequestered in the ocean in the form of ices. When the water warms too much, the methane is released from the ice. This makes it way into the atmospehre. Methane is a much better greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This ended up causing a further 5 degree C atmospheric rise. This happened very quickly and helped to pummel the End-Permian lifeforms even more. If the simulations (PDF) of Jeff Kiehl and Christine Shields of NCAR hold up to the fossil record, this means that the methane in the atmosphere end up whacking the ozone and unleashes a lot of normally blocked ultraviolet light [here too] above and beyond the norm which helps kill off the terrrestrial ecosystems as well.

As if to add insult to injury, the hypoxic-anoxic oceans encouraged growth of anaerobic bacteria that produce lots of hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is nasty stuff and highly toxic. It would help kill even more in the oceans than even oxygen deprivation would. It would, futhermore, bubble out of the oceans and kill right and left anything that took a whif on land. However, to make things even worse, Kiehl et al state that it increases that length of time that the methane remains in the atmosphere. This increases the amount and heating and away we go.

Though a new comment on "32. Potable liquids" notes one that seems even better, and it makes potable water.

http://commodityecology.blogspot.com/2007/06/32-potable-liquids.html

The general ecology we depend upon still requires clean terrestrialwater sources though, so while the following is a human solution it is hardly a substitute for cleaning up water pollution on the ground.

Published January 10, 2008 12:14 PM

New Device Turns Air into Drinking Water

All around the world, we're dealing with a severe water shortage. Anentire continent, Australia, is so dry that cities have set up "waterpolice" to rat out residents who use their garden hoses a single moment longer than they're meant to.

For years, Israel, too, has been dealing with a tremendous drought; the water sources that still exist in the arid country are often sopolluted that the water is undrinkable.

Luckily, there's one resource we've still got plenty of: Air.

And thanks to a new company, Houston, Texas-based Aquamaker, that air can now be converted into drinkable water. Much like a dehumidifier, the company's new technology works to capture humidity in the air andconvert it into water. The system has filters in place to get rid ofany pollutants in the air, ensuring that the resulting liquid is completely safe to drink.

"It's your own well, and it's clean," the CEO of Aquamaker's Israel branch, Eita Markovits, told The Jerusalem Post. "We believe that five to ten years from now, we will be part of how Israel supplies its citizens with water."

Aquamaker's machines are capable of producing up to 5,000 liters ofwater at a time, which would be enough to supply an entire village with fresh water, without draining an area's precious natural resources.

When used in combination with a solar power generator, they provide an environmentally friendly alternative to bottled water for areas with a limited tap water supply.

Currently, the devices are sold in the US, Australia, Israel, andseveral other countries, and are available in both commercial andindustrial sizes.

We may not all need to pick up one of these machines just yet, but it's comforting to know that no matter what disasters global warming throws our way, we'll always have something to drink.

Anon 1:40 thank-you for that little explainer,-and the contrast of your substance versus the empty blather of anon 12:53.

Hey mousie boy; do you ever get embarrassed at how ignorant your negativity leads you to be? No, -I suppose even embarrassment is over your head. Well thanks anyway, if your shlock motivated anon 1:40 to post.

I think, for me, the thing that is important to focus on is that the future is not as dark as it seems, and the paranormal world is not as hostile toward us as the mere existence of conspiracies can lead us to believe.

The world is heading toward some long-overdue changes, and that ought to terrify me, but for some reason it doesn't. I believe the forces of good outweight the forces of evil, and things are going to be ok.

That's why I'm interested more in the light side of the paranormal than in conspiracies, because when it comes down to it, the people who have their heads down conspiring are actually the ones who understand *least* what's really going on, and are going to be the most seriously impaired by whatever big cultural-spiritual-planetary shifts come down the pike.

So uncovering conspiracies isn't actually as useful as it might seem, because they're going to unravel of their own accord. Building hope and compassion and future on the small scale, from interpersonal relationships up through local neighbourhoods (and religious congregations, if you're into such things), is where life is going to be found. IMO.

Trust your intuition. The gut instinct that recoils from darkness shows us that light exists. Believe that there is an alternative to the global death machine we seem to be locked in, and take small steps toward change, and you will be answered with big ones. The light side of this huge cosmos is more powerful than we realise.

"You note?" With reference to what? Yourself? That's not rigorous. "Blah, Blah" indeed. That's one of the most honest things you have said.

The only restrictions are your own. Mentally and emotionally.

If you get entertainment from watching yourself refuse to do anything (like Jeff's enjoyment of the narcotic of "disaster porn") this list is populated by many sick puppies. Happy Father's day, Jeff Wells, indeed. The ultimate sarcasm I think. What kind of mothers, fathers, and general human beings narcotically prefer to enjoy passively the process of their children dying when medicine is a second away? Ethically poor ones, I say. And ones addicted to endlessly reexperiencing a certain neurochemical cocktail of chemicals of passivity.

If you are more comfortable strangling in the solitude you prefer, to steal a songline, no one will pull you from that world you have created for yourself. Except yourself. On one level, Drew, you're a drowning man who will drag anyone down with him just to prove his point, sort of like Jeff Wells I guess. The only person who suffers from this is you.

Rigor would have noted that humid air doesn't suffer from "restrictions apply"?

Come on Drew, my world is big enough for even you. Your world is very small, I think.

A short film on turning around worst case scenarios of soil in the world, turning them into a (mycelium-rich) garden. The heavily salty desert around the even more heavily salty Dead Sea in Jordan becomes a garden without pumping in extra water or artificial fertilizer/herbicides. "We could green the entire Middle East in this way," Geoff Lawton says in the film.

What is so like the conversation here is that the agronomists they talked to (like some here) really hated them for trying and succeeding because it called attention to other's passivity as a choice that looked foolish instead of rational.

Sow mushrooms, and soil will come as the permacultural accident noted. Even in Middle Eastern millenia-old deserts--without any extra rain or artificial chemicals. The soil will come in two years.

Hamlet--talking of suicide--or Jeff Wells enjoying his disaster porn narcotically with laughter without doing anything thinking that can make him a good father [?]--demonstrates the attitude of those who intentionally refuse to adapt to something better a touch away and sit still, in fear.

"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them? ...

... makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know naught of?Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;And enterprises of great pith and moment,With this regard, their currents turn awry,And lose the name of action."

-- Hamlet, Act III, scene i

I don't think the internet is a huge waste of time, though I do think that if all you like to do is waste time, you are the demographic loves the internet. However, this demographic's view of the internet is not the whole picture.

I think that those who do waste a large amount of time on the internet can project that the powers that be want them to waste their time here. It's probably just a projection because it's not hwo the powers that be are showing they are afraid of the internet.

There is the rapid pace that the powers that be want to [1] demote this peer-to-peer internet, for a corporatist only payer based access instead of open free access, [2] are desperate to monitor and authorize all content on it (like in Spain I read where the internet publishing once was attempted to eb government vetted, or the laws that increasingly attempt to hold the server owners accountable for their poster's beliefs, or the rapid pace that governments attempt to shut down the sharing internet (like in China). Or how the Korean corporate and government media displace blame from themselves for misinforming people, by 'blaming the internet' for making it easy in that heavily wired country to start mass protests against Mad Cow beef importation of the USA into Korea.

The Internet gives us networking parity potential with the nepotistic elites, and they don't like that. (Only potential, you still have to do something.)

I don't think it's rigorous to project personal use of the internet as a time waster onto everyone, particularly those who can utilize it constructively in many different ways as we have seen in protests that have come to be organized through it in Korea and China or even the USA.

Sure it can be just another TV for some, though it's a huge false leap to claim that because you use it as a narcotic it is utilized only in that way all the time and an even further false leap to imply the powers that be want us to 'waste time' here. Their actions with regard to the internet prove this false if any still test assumptions anymore. Perhaps the demographic of RI has changed to opium den--not a place to exhibit mental rigor anymore?

The internet isn't the opiate of the masses. If you personally want an opiate, you find it. Though not everyone is using it for that opiate.

Take the moral (morel?) of the story of the mushroom mentioned by Stamets above. It's not what it is. The same mushroom has many uses besides psychedelics and elite gourmets. It's what you use it for. The same goes for the internet.

Mark...thanks for the rigor.The potential for organizing is there and that implies a vast potential for abuse of that potential.Just think if the Cheneys hijacked some political action website and sent emails to everyone there to "meet at Liberty Pole way at 3:00 for the march" and when we all show up, we get thrown into the backs of freight cars and whisked off to the FEMA camp?The potential to sit on the 'puter and watch...anything...exists. It is a reflection of the consensual hallucination, a portal for the hologram. And it's interactive.The elites probably don't like it.I agree.and they must be just dying for that day when, as in China, it is controlled (more or less)But that interactivity is also something to be exploited.I think we mighht see interactive commercial programming happen, TV will get a shot in the arm, become more interactive, the TV will spy on you much the same way that the internet can. Or the computer will become something else completely. Not dependent on individual desktops or physical memory files that you carry on a stick..though who'd a thunk that say 20 years ago?The internet is the beta version.Now the PTB know exactly how to control it.

Mamma Mia!Anti-war activists have marched through the streets of Rome to protest the war policies of the US as President Bush arrived in Italy.

George W. Bush, coming from Germany on his European farewell tour, arrived at Rome’s Ciampino airport Wednesday afternoon.

Bush and his motorcade headed toward the US ambassador’s residence in an upscale Rome neighborhood.

Thousands of people gathered in the center of Rome to demonstrate against the US president’s visit.

“We demonstrate against the government of the United States and its war policies, its social, military and environmental crimes around the world but also against the Italian centre-right government which, as the former centre-left one, is allied with the US one, and thus co-responsible of such policy,” said Marco Ferrando, a member of the Communist Party of the Workers who was protesting on Wednesday.

I walk the line and it's 50/50. The internet for me is the razor's edge and no different from all the other choices made here and elsewhere. It's the imposition on choice weighted one way or the other, that one must guard against.

What's your ultimate goal in regards to your activism? What do you wish to see come about as the result of your and other's efforts? Do you wish to "reclaim America," or "take this Country back," as many in the Alex Jones camp contend? If so, what mythical America is it that is to be "reclaimed" and "taken back?" Is it the America where children worked 10 hours a day in factories in toxic conditions for a mere pittance? Is it the America where if you were industrious enough, you could own a plantation equipped with not so lily-white skinned slaves from Africa? Is it the America that, for all intents and purposes, absconded the entire North American continent from the Native inhabitants who couln't produce a Deed?

Morning, all. Especially to the Servant Of Dawn who's been gracing my email with some great morning reading.

Speaking of which - @Satanonymous the emailer (aka anony number 237 here) - my body may be a vehicle, but it's far from a ragtop.

I HATE convertibles. A perversion of design. Compromise is defeat, and fagtops are indeed a compromise.

Problem with soul-vehicles, though - how the f&*k do you get the seatbelt undone when the thing is sinking into the river our life-roads float crumbling on?

Anyway, I like to think of myself more as a utility vehicle. Sporty I'm not, but I can do rough roads and there's plenty of grimy old tools in the canvas sack in the back seat. Plus, I seem to continue operating after usage that would render most soul transports into the functionless lawn ornaments used by my social class to symbolize their own physical decline and pride in past strength.

Anyway, aaaalll the way back around to actually responding to your, um, letters - hey, send me weird stuff anytime you like. It's hilarious. Google will probably start to think I'm disreputable, and it'll be right.

But if you seriously think you're going to 'bother me all the time', as you warn, I have to assume you've got a lot of time on your own hands.

Shouldn't you be misleading schoolchildren or turning a nun or joining a cabal of school principals or something? I mean, wasting your Master's voice on a chewy piece of metaphysical gristle like me - oh, I get it. I'm a chew toy, you're a puppy.

Well, the latter part, anyway.

Starting to find this place going all Disney with mice and kitties and puppy-bat things and hidden darkness,Lord Reptor.

Mark -- it's kind of like that Naked Experiment video. Sure she's naked but she doesn't recommend it because she got too cold and she couldn't get any real work done.

You show these "save the world" videos but it's some dude NOT from the area and he says NOTHING about the local social conditions for changing the area.

MARK -- how much FIELD work have you done in sustainability?

Let me give you some examples from my experience in Costa Rica:

1) Move into conservation biology school next to a "protected" reserve. The guard gives me a tour -- he brags that he's son of rich cattle rancher (destroying local ecology) and he was fighting the Sandinistas (paid by the U.S. tax payer). Meanwhile I interview the local people around the "protected" reserve. They openly tell me they hunt in the reserve -- why -- because they're too poor to afford other types of meat.

2) National parks in Costa Rica -- invaded by poor people. Why? Because massive farms for export have stolen the land of traditional farmers, replacing traditional crops with plantations relying on pesticides and destroying the local ecology.

I could go on Mark -- but I think my point is obvious. You're ignoring the social conditions in which ecology takes place. The same type of disregard happened by the Western "ecologists" with whom I attended school in Costa Rica. They did not know Spanish and did not take into account the socioeconomic issues.

To bring it back to the Naked video that is linked next to the video you posted -- the Westerners were TOO COLD.

What we are all witnessing today, is the birth of a new civilization, a new paradigm, a new consciousness, a new outlook on life, and in our role and place in this Universe.And as with every birth, comes the most natural consequence: pain.The waters are breaking. It hurts us all: Paranoia, stress, anxiety, confusion... FEAR!Weather the ego dies or survives the coming transition, it matters not. Dead or alive we're all in the same boat.

Drew, I gave it to the office. We've had this conversation before. I think it's pointless. Scroll back many moons ago.

Don't rest on your laurels, Drew. What you do nowadays is write your open diary on the web about sitting around in Burger King presumably flashing orgasms at people in complete isolation with your head inside a mathematics book exhibiting paranoia and insecurity here though writing about your statesmanlike way with the people somewhere else, and generally acting like the next John Nash though without the credentials to prove it before you slip into madness.

That is not my idea of constructive revolution or something that justifies your high opinion of yourself.

Drew, write your book. Cut out the internet for a while. Don't waste time arguing with me is my advice. You waste a lot of time picking pointless fights with your sympathizers and your own phantoms, Mr. Nash, I mean Drew--in my opinion the only kind of transactional psychological game you know how to play.

Oh great and wise Ghoul, do not listen to the blatherings of Mark. Mark is addicted to common sense and free will and being the master of one's fate, all dreadfully outmoded forms of 20th century meme making.

This is the 21st century goddamn it!

You're extensive knowledge of a throbbing purple veined vagus nerve leads me to believe that the real revolution will begin at Burger King and McDonalds as well as other havens of meat mastication. As your orgasmic aura permeates the capitalist mind-set of these temples to belly flab, I see it entering and transforming things as outre and occult as the $1 menu.

Instead of our current woeful state of nutrition enhancement where each drive thru spews such Earth bound and chakra inhibiting questions as, "Do you want it super-sized?," I see a future where adepts such as yourself beam a soul shattering and Earth moving orgasm with each meal.Sort of a "Happy Meal" for adults.

When that day dawns birds will sing anew and children will dance fresh faced and glowing through the morning dew confident that God's in His heaven and all is right in the world.

@3G & ever'body else: IMHO, Jet Li's best flick is the incredigble Chinese Army Propaganda Pictures Ltd.flick Born To Defense.

Find it. Watch it. Wait, as you watch it, for the line "RoodilyToodilyBudily". When you have found that moment, you must then seek the deeper knowledge to be found in the second Street Fighter flick. Ahh, yes. Sonny Chiba. 6'6 of halfbreed fury (in lifts, but still, he rulz OK). You're looking for the scene where the Street Fighter Rips The Balls Right Off a big bad black rapist guy.

You cannot understand the awesome, inelegant depths of Chinese moviemaker's racism towards black people until you have found these things.

It's the first movie in this series where the esophagus removal happens. Also a very fine moment.

@TripleG again - You should check out Graham Kerr's latest - the Molded Ethnic Vegetable. A nutritious dried brick of mixed vegetable matter, seasoned with ethnicity vaguely appropriate to either the side dish or the location (I can't recall).

Jesus, he really is the worst public cook in Oceania.

Betting you'd eat one of my cinnamon buns bigu or no bigu,Lord Reptor.

So Drew, you're saying that since you drink a glass of water and fast for 8 days and sit in full lotus, it doesn't really matter what you ingest (even toxic "meat" slabs, fried at a fast food joint)and that's because you're , what, starving?? so you don't get that "judgemental" abouit what you injest?that's completely ass-backwards you realize. Must be some 3:4 harmonica thing i don't understand, right? or are you fucking with us?AndAren't there any better places to hang out near you?damn.McDonalds gives me anxiety attacks, i avoid them like the plague. In fact, i don't think I've stepped foot in one in like 10 years.and the drinking mouth wash..?dude...Why not try eating something healthy and eating like, um every day or so?try that out, see if the thing we like to call reality ever comes back to your "small universe".

Yeah this book looks really familiar and I'm pretty sure I read it maybe 6 years ago.....

So the 100 days means NO loss of the "precious bodily fluids" haha. I would still go with Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality.

You practice the small universe a lot -- plus simple standing exercises -- plus the Taoist Yoga diet -- plus lots of mind yoga. Again you can get the $11 level 1 sitting meditation c.d. with the small universe exercise on it from http://springforestqigong.com.

I was "innocent" in the sense I didn't realize this stuff would make me a "chic magnet" haha. So I avoided females -- just cause I was shy -- practiced about 4 hours a day and then increased it to 6 hours a day while fasting. That was while starting full-lotus about half way through. So full-lotus is not necessary but it helps a lot to quickly transform the jing to chi. Remember that your chi will be pulled down to jing and then down into sexual fluid -- by the desire of females (and your desire for them) and pervert males (perverts in the sense of either straight or not -- just that the pervert male's shen is focused in their sex chakra). The difference between females and pervert males -- for one - is that the female climax goes UP -- and does not switch to the stress system at climax. The whole point is to learn how to have female climaxes and once you convert enough jing to chi and finally open it up into shen -- then you can shoot the shen-chi into females and they can soak it up while you take in their jing energy. This creates a free energy exchange of mutual climaxes and this in turn opens up the heart chakra. Pervert males, in contrast, will try to pull your chi back down into sex fluid because the goal of the pervert male is to make MORE external sex fluid, thereby activating their stress system and YOUR stress system. As they do this more as an addictive cycle they then need to feed off more sexual energy of others WITHOUT being able to give others any shen-chi energy. Of course you can just shoot shen-chi into the pervert males, thereby not enable them to convert your shen-chi into sexual fluid -- but whether they convert your energy back into the stress fluid loss or not -- the energy you give them will still be used by THEM as stress fluid energy. Eventually they will learn that their approach is a loss for themselves.... still, I'd prefer to shoot my energy into females. haha.

old news G3.of course being a useless eater is useless too eh?I am reminded of the noble Samurai. A pawn of monumental proportions, though His experience was Valid, nonetheless..The samurai eats light.light is the energy given off by the sun and the samurai, besides being efficient killing machines, well trained and heavily armoured (before they turned to decadence)(like so many of us)would sometimes be in the midst of battle, stranded on an outcrop of rock in the mountains with nothing to eat save the rations his envoy brought for the campaighn, well, these rations would not last and the trancendantal teachings of fasting and enlightenment would kick in, for certain.Fighting lean the samurai would go into battle on a long charge sometimes on little else than hunted fowl.Everyone knows the mechanisms that activate during starvation or fasting.Even the word, "fasting" implies something else.starving ethiopians seeing aliens, Indian's seeing Vishnuswhirling saucers of sauce.Yer crazy, dude.Numbers become tantamount to a religious experience for some on long fasts.anorexics report magical thinking all the time, like the number 9, like "if i could just weigh 90 pounds" people are sick. they die of starvation. Or is that just passing into the great unknown... The body is a vehicle all right. And if'n ya don't put fuel in'er she don't drive.off to cook Tofu,fletcher.

"In the City of God there will be a great thunder,Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures,the great leader will succumb,The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.

First off, let's say straight out that this was not written by Nostradamus at all. Yes it superficially resembles his style, but there is no such quatrain and he didn't write it. In fact, some sites that reference this verse state it was written in 1654 which would be an impressive feat for someone who died nearly 100 years before!

Before we look at who did write it, let us use it as an exercise in critical thinking. We will break down the key points it raises:

City of God. This could match anything you like - Mecca, or a city with a lot of churches (e.g. Rome), or a city with many religions (e.g. Jerusalem), or a city which is unusually impressive. You name it. Two brothers torn apart by chaos. Again this could be anything. Allied countries, or political party coalitions, or two ajoining neighborhoods, or royalty where there have been numerous inter marriages. etc. The third big war. Give me a break. How many big wars have there been since Nostradamus was alive? Even excluding WW I & II, you should immediately think of Vietnam, the Gulf War, the US Civil War, the Napoleonic wars, the Crimea, the Russian Civil War, the Russia-Japan war, the American War of Independence, the Spanish Civil War. And so on. Tens if not hundreds of thousands died in each these conflicts. Is that not big enough? A big city burning.. Tends to happen in wars. Dozens alone in World War II - Dresden, London, Berlin, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo. When all is considered we are left with is a verse which is so ambiguous on every line that you could with little effort match it to many different possibilities.

So who wrote this quatrain and what was their point?

This quatrain was actually created by a student called Neil Marshall in an article called "A Critical Analysis of Nostradamus" [1]. His point in writing the above was to highlight that some Nostradamus quatrains are so vague as to be open to any interpretation after the fact.

In fact this is not the only phony verse to have been concocted after 9/11. The urban legends site Snopes.com [2] has plenty more.

"A relation to finitude, externalized, so that the planet might share in our hurtling towards mortality. They come and go, their henny-penny hand wringing folding into the dustbin of time. But the earth, in its tortoise like banality, goes on."

You pegged it...Jeff is scared of his mortality, and the reality of it has him projecting his horror onto the planet as if the planet is going to share in his mortality fright fetish.

We're all going away.

Jeff is depressed because his xtian background did not adequately prepare him for the reality of the old aeon dying.

Lots of death coming.

oh well. Day by day till then.

Cheer the fuck up though.Jesus, already. I have a little girl.

Shit may happen.

Let's play out some bad to very bad scenarios.Do it. Think it out. What is the answer to preparing? Guns, ammo.

There. There is your answer until the Bad Thing happens to you and you are snuffed put.

Good father? Guns.

Good husband? Guns.

There ya go.

If you are as skeered as you let on, there is your answer. Not a good answer. But that is it. Sorry. It just is that shitty. There is no invisible cloud being to save us.

But cheer the fuck up.

Get some gold, silver, food preps and stay alive a couple extra weeks.

Get some guns and stay alive a couple extra months.

But we are alllllll going away.

Mentally focus by detaching yourself from the internet NOW.

If you don't, it will be that much scarier when we are disconnected and not able to "discuss" ...lol.

Get the guns though. Maybe disconnect your internet and use the monthly saving to buy guns and ammo. Stop paying for your fucking cable and buy some silver. Trade in your fucking car with its monthly payments, buy a paid for used car, and buy some gold with the savings.You have months left to do these things. So do it.

Like I say, it may get you a few more months instead of a few extra weeks.

If you value a month more than you value a week, then it is worth it. If a week and month are all the same to your way of thinking, then don't. Once gone it is not like you are going to reflect and say "Aaaaah good thing I had that extra 2 weeks...aaaah." Nope, gone is gone. Like I say, worry about prepping only if months are valued and estimated to mean something better to you than weeks. Time is time is time. So it is nothing to feel bad about if you don't prep. As long as you know you shortened your stay....but that is so miniscule relatively speaking that I can't blame anyone for not prepping. Lot of work just for a few more lousy days or maybe weeks. Days that will probably be living nightmares anyway.

It's up to you. YOU. No god to save your ass. We're all outta here.

New aeon coming. It was told.Shoulda known.

Hoping and prepping for my little girl. No hope for me. i feed a little bluebird in my heart for her....was that Bukowski? something about a bluebird in his heart. I dunno.

Anyway, cheers

Quite soon now. Forgive yourself if you have to do that.

Remember, get the guns and ammo. Unless you have no one you need to protect, then just say fuck it. But you might need one for final exit, so even if you have no one to protect, it might be good to have at least one around.

Dude,1/2 of the topsoil in Ohio is gone, ok, there is 25 feet of it left. The parasites who sit on their ass and count their compound interest, and live in rat races, who have no idea where their food comes from should be eating their mud cakes. Castles made of sand. Too sad too bad. It is back to nature, a respect of everything natural. A respect for this wonderful planet. No time for doom and gloom here, garden is taking root, river is high.Shine forth brave and sensible hu-man beings. Respectfully, Dennis from Oregon.

Mark, I must commend you on having the courage to post the Benjamin Fulford link. Having the willingness to align oneself with someone like Fulford says loads about your integrity & rigor.

I particularly enjoyed how he characterized the insidious nature of Asian secret societiesby first giving the number of Asian gangster members in said secret society as 800,000 then quickly shifting to 1.8 million gangsters. Obviously Mr. Fulford was alluding to the speed with which these secret societies grow like metastasized cancers. Naysayers will foolishly suggest that Mr. Fulford use cue cards in the future to avoid such glaring "flubs," but we truth-seekers, we of the squeegy cleaned third eye, know this was metaphor not mistake.

Mr. Fulford also has the incredibly devious foresight to adopt all the mannerisms and tics of the mentally ill, thereby lulling 'the adversary,' 'the beast,' 'the Sabbatinian Evil' into a false sense of security.

Anyone who could have David Rockefeller brought to him bound, "with a vibrator up his ass," is a man to be reckoned with. Referring to his interconnected web of sheer power as "my turf" betrays a humility that goes way above and far beyond the call of duty.

Sax Rohmer would be proud of Mr. Fulford, the obvious trans-time blood kin of Sir Denis Nayland Smith, and his handling of the Asian arm of the Illuminati menace.

How the man ever laid his hands on "the booklet" of not one, but two secret societies is quite beyond the limited scope of my imagination.

Nerves of steel & balls of iron on that rotund little Canuck, I'd say. He would have done the Home Office proud back in my day. Yes sir, without a doubt.

His photo of the "Secret Society Ceremony" reminds me of something Sir Denis saw whilst under the mind altering "black medicine" of the dread Doctor.

Sir Denis would also be proud that a portion of that "yellow menace" has been converted to our side.

Mr. Rockefeller is obviously a nefarious opponent. One might call him an adept of nefariousness. So Mr. Fulford quite wisely includes a translation and dissection of Mr. Rockefeller's every answer, highlighting the key phrases that might escape the attention of those without the benefit of easy access to a liberating regimen of Haldol & Clorpromazine.The bit where he catches Mr. Rockefeller deviating from his Google and Wiki-pedia persona, exposing, quite nicely I must say, the shape shifting nature of this elite reptilian scum is, to say the least, priceless and worth the admission fee. Then he goes on to show how "the conspiracy" speaks in "code" by translating "difference of opinion" into "causing trouble." For the record, Mr. Fulford has chosen the sanitized version. Her Majesties Squad of Really Snappy Code Breakers has put it as literally being:

As I understand it, the "Satanists" must put obscenities in every phrase they utter. The descending number scheme is a little understood glitch in "the Matrix." There are some who feel that this glitch could be the "Rosetta Stone" that unlocks their "mostly made up of good folks" evil secret society. Did I mention that they're also nefarious?

Again Mr. Fulford shows his shamanic mastery of semantics when he pokes through David Rockefeller's "Secret Ruler of the World" disguise, exposing the 'raw gob-stopper heart" of what, to the untrained, might appear to be the onset of old age and senility, is, in reality, the insulated cocoon of the Master, gliding oblivious and unconcerned amid the rarefied air of "the elite."

OK -- I was just reading the OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA today. That book is such a craze! Michael Pollan. I'd also glanced through it and seen it in all the bookstore windows, etc. -- but my mom was reading it.

So 1st part:

Corn-fed cattle. We're screwed.

2nd part:

Organic food -- shipped long distance requiring 4,000 more calories in oil energy than it provides in food energy.

We're screwed.

3rd part:

Can't remember -- the dude goes off into the "forest" and forages shrooms or something and then ends the book with a gourmet meal stating it was the best in the world or something.

Reminds me of that cable show I just watched -- Andrew Pourain -- or something like that -- famous NY actor face -- travel show -- goes to HONG KONG to eat:

Donald Crowhurst (1932–1969) had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from the Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide....

Crowhurst ended radio transmissions on June 29. Teignmouth Electron was found adrift, unoccupied, on July 10.

Mental breakdown and death

Crowhurst's behavior as recorded in his logs indicates a complex and conflicted psychological state. His commitment to faking the trip seemed incomplete and self-defeating, as he reported unrealistically fast progress that was sure to arouse suspicion. By contrast, he spent many hours meticulously constructing false log entries, often more difficult to complete than real entries, due to the celestial navigation research required.

The last several weeks of his log entries, once he was facing a real possibility of winning the prize, showed increasing irrationality. In the end, his writings during the voyage - poems, quotations, real and fake log entries, and random thoughts - amounted to more than 25,000 words. The log books include an attempt to construct a philosophical reinterpretation of the human condition that would provide an escape from his impossible situation. The number 243 shows up several times in these writings: he originally planned to finish the trip in 243 days, recorded a false distance of 243 nautical miles (450 km) in one day's sailing (which if valid would have been a record day's run at the time), and may have ended his life on the 243rd day (July 1) of his voyage.

His last log entry was on June 29, 1969; it is assumed that he then jumped overboard and drowned....Although his biographers, Tomalin and Hall, discounted the possibility that some sort of food poisoning contributed to his mental condition, they acknowledged the fact that there is insufficient evidence to rule that possibility out."

INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE TO RULE OUT FOOD POISONING.

In fact the real problem was the Crowhurst had grown up destitute, after moving from British imperial India back to the "garden of eden" -- a bastion of coal pollution.

The dude then had a failing engineering business and got capitalist funding for a "new age" boat that failed....

In other words Crowhurst represents people like MARK or other techno-fix idealists obsessed with posting "numbers" on the internet. We can plant "x" and get "y."

Fat people are starving themselves to death! Insufficient evidence to rule out food poisoning -- when in fact ALL of western civilization is "food poisoning" because of numerology -- bad math lies at the foundation for bad food.

OK so my dad's in the car. I go, sit in full-lotus, a drive down to the village store. He parks while going into the post office. A young female and her dad walk by. The pineal gland shoots energy into her, she's sucking it up, my vagus nerve pulsating. Mutual climax. They go into the post office. Come out -- her dad says hi to me and I say hi back -- smiles everyone!

That's my life -- O at a Ds with the dog last night. He needs healing -- 13 years old! His back legs barely work. Full-lotus for about an hour next to him -- hands on him -- sucking up his extra energy (disharmonized electrochemicals) -- transforming it into chi-light through the full-lotus -- vagus nerve pulsating -- pineal gland shooting it back into the dog.

Years ago, after encountering Krishnamurti, Henry Miller said the very act of reading a book, let alone writing one, seemed like a silly and useless thing to do. So, any interuption in one's writing quest cannot be given too much weight, for the dilemna persists in the failings of human consciousness as manifested in our diseased society and our crumbling civilization. As William Gaddis wrote 50 years ago, "it's all going to get a lot worse before it gets any better." If there is a better. The options are limited to the point of having to force the fantasy that any exist at all. I don't know how I will explain this to my 6 year old son. Samuel Beckett had the grasp on "nothing to be done" yet somehow managed to persevere in his own inimitable way. Praying at gas stations, eulogzing a lost turnip...how like they are in the portrayal of the disease.

Have to agree with the whole 'armed fathers are good fathers' ideal expressed above. My own parents lived up to their own ideals at considerable pragmatic and emotional expense - and that was in easy times.

Even if you find it distasteful to struggle or disgraceful to want to survive, your kids don't feel the same. They haven't had time to get all ruined inside yet and don't feel that way. They want to live.

Myself, I got over myself enough a while ago to learn to live to live. I think personal armament is a good idea if you think you can handle it. If you feel you might make irresponsible choices with it, then use alternatives. Talking your way out of things, combining an axe with surprise, making a zip gun from scrap spring steel (the bits left over from your leaf-spring crossbow?) - lots of options.

Hell, even G-man packs distance weapons. He can make a thug come in his own pants at twenty paces.

Anyway, yeah - armed dad = smart dad.

Heck, I think I might even go take my certificate. I should learn to hunt. That way I can find out if I'm really a vegetarian after all - when I'm shoulder-deep in Bambi's still-hot belly, rippin' out the gralloch-bits.

Semi-errata - I didn't mean to say, in my last post, that my parent's need to live up to their own ideals no matter the cost was a good thing. Their ideals were Western 'individualist' twentieth-century Walter Mitty slave-mindset bullshit, and they imposed their weak foolishness upon the children.

What I meant to say was, if your personal 'ideals' conflict with the maximum protection, advantage, and gain for your children, you suck. Lose the ideals - your kids will rightly judge you for them. Live for them that one day our final children may live for us.

And if you think chucking them off the dock is teaching them how to swim, then I hope by Google that they keep on swimming away from you as fast as they can.

It's an important question, because it may only have been Mumia today, and yesterday, but it may be you tomorrow, because sometime in the near future, considering the meltdown to come, trouble's going to come looking for you, and you'll understand then, but it will be a small consolation, considering.

This analogy sounds hokey, but it's one I have experience with. It's like being gay and acting gay and thinking gay and fantasizing gay and still regarding yourself as heterosexual.

I've always known, since I was very young, that evil would triumph and the world would end in fire, while thinking of myself as a member of a species that was going to make it. I've even said "the world is overpopulated" without knowing that I was agreeing with the rich elite who plot to commit class genocide. Now when people say it to me, I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach.

Truth, justice, and peace are rapidly turning into evolutionary dead ends. The meek will inherit the earth because you gotta' have a place to bury people and leave them behind, right?

Ok so here's the deal. First of all I have resorted to excessive Listerine intake due to my stubborn insistance on eating a "normal" diet -- that which is in front of the stomachs of those I engage with.

Secondly -- fast food restaurants tend to accumulate, based on my "expert" experience," people who are a) not too repressed because they're not fixated on climbing the bourgeois ladder b) convinced by the "glamour" of the Hollywood "tie-in" marketing, etc.

OK so all your all guilt trips are just as real as any "O at a D" I've ever had. I hope your happy! haha.

The full-lotus is not me -- it just appears to be me while I sit in it.

Ponder that while I go finish sorting turf waiting for the mint listerine to wear off.

Also -- just for the record -- I spent $10 today on Japanese dried seaweed and another $7 on Indian Curry packaged for Chinese Americans. God bless this fucking insane imperial illness called the "melting pot."

I hope you all get majorly stoned either tonight or tomorrow. Thanks for sharing and condemning me and also spewing all your toxic love-juice all, psychically, over me. Don't think I'm not keen to your little games.

#23. When offering proof for your claims, make sure the rubes pay for it. This way you narrow down the naysayers to a small group of suckers who will be too embarrassed by their own gullibility to actually reveal that they've been suckered.

"I was offered to join, at the highest levels,the Western secret society. I was given a Freemason badge, and offered the job of Finance Minister of Japan. I have video and tape recorded proof of this, which will be available to those who wish to pay for the information. Otherwise, you'll just have to take my word for it."

#24. When speaking allegorically, it's best to use visual aids.

"He told me I had the chance to join their ranks and become the Ultraman of the United Nations, or being killed." (Narration delivered over photo of Fulford & "Ninja Assassin" standing in front of a wall with a photo of Ultraman and a photo of the United Nations Seal on it.)

#25. Make sure that your Ninja assassin turned bodyguard accessorizes properly. While decoder rings are no longer fashionable, there are other alternatives.

"...he had a Freemason ring, as well as a special Ninja ring which looked like the face of a devil, with horns on it, made of solid gold..."

#26. When offering proof, it is imperative that one use others whose agenda is as questionable as one's own.

"The nature of these people, we have now found out, is that they belong to an ancient religious sect that can be known as Satanists."

#28. Make sure your description of "Satanists" makes no sense whatsoever. If one can make the Satanists appear to be vaguely akin to Secular Humanists, this practically guarantees that your claims will believed by every Christian within ear shot.

"They believe that there is no God, that they are God."

#29. While you are mentioning "Satanists" it is always a good idea to narrate over a photo montage of celebrities and political leaders "signing" "I love you." The two fingers pointing up look vaguely "devilish," and, quite frankly, if anyone watching hasn't wet themselves laughing by this point in your presentation, they're probably too "rube-like" to notice anyway.

#30. Conclude by offering keys to decipher the "hidden language" of our "oppressors." Tools that will unlock the hidden recesses of "the shadow government," allowing us access to THE TRUTH. Just ensure that you do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone what those tools and keys actually are.

"The secret societies and political organizations running THE NEW WORLD ORDER use various SYMBOLS and NUMBERS. Once you learn their SECRET LANGUAGE, you too will have the ALL SEEING EYE." (Film concludes with 3 + minutes of another photo montage with a nifty "quaalude" version of "For What It's Worth" over top. No secret language primer though.)

I would appreciate your take on a more substantive conspiracy theory. Like carbon is the monster byproduct of modern man and not the other 67,000 toxic chemicals that are spewed into the environment. How $4.00 gas means we need to drill off Florida's coast and we need to do it now and how "cap and trade" really isn't "ABCP".

Yes. Thanks for the cathy o'brien link. Tranceformation of America is a MUST READ for anyone interested in occult mind control.If it's true...it all fits.and implicates soooo many people.Robert C. ByrdGeorge Bush Sr. & Jr.The ClintonsReagan...the whole Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz control thing is just so perfect too..

Oh and of course, Dick Cheneyand his most dangerous game...but can anyone prove any of it? would anyone listen?it's just more than crazy how this information is so repressed or just ignored.it's more than a little hard to look at.

@My supersatanic email buddy: You were looking for sense in my posts? What, you think I get paid for this s^&t? You want me to bust a sweat, then show me the colour of your lettuce lips, honey.

Not entirely sure what the rest of our 'dialogue' has actually been regarding...you sure you got the right address?

Eventually I suppose I'll either get enough information from you for some coherent whole to form, but right now...bud, you think I'm the one not making sense? Maybe you should check your sent-mail.

You seem to be cc-ing me emails intended for your other satanic buddies - at least, I assume that by sending me a cut+paste of an email sent to me by you minutes earlier, addressed to someone else (one Swamp Doggie), with nothing added but 'hehehehehe', you boned your button-pushing 101 course.

Unless you meant me to be in on your secret conversation with your secret buddy regarding your clever harassing of a poor little web kitten like me? That would be complicated. And dumb.

Well, anytime you feel like playing, you can be my ball of string. I loves playing.

Got any more little web friends to introduce me to? This Maenad sounds interesting. Betcha I could make her wild West Wind blow tame by dawn. Send her on down - forget Pan baby, come to the big old monkey in the garden. You'll laugh when you come.

Anyway, Goat-friend, hope you have a fun day. I plan to.

Remember the time you went to the secret caves and your goat-skull had a cigarette butt in its mouth and roaches on its forehead? Deep down in the dark, boys, your little magics mean less than the breath in your throat.

@All - Sorry for the off-thread response there - somebody out here is having a lovely time with my inbox, and for various reasons I only respond to mail that has the clink of ready coin apparent and a reasonably telephonable return point.

Pretty damn funny, though. I do wonder if the fellow has me mixed up with someone Else, among all the other stuff he looks at first glance to have mixed up.

I'm all for mixed company, though. Especially as he seems to have the kind of friend who's better than a friend in need or a friend with weed and that's the kind who bleeds (pure/morning, pure/morning).

I'll put up with a lot of earnest burning-eyed blather if it comes with the kind of company that make me feel all wistful and humpy.

Damn, I had really hoped for a little more alliterative onomatopoetic action in that last paragraph. Or at least a better internal rhyme.

Anyway, while I'm off track here and soapboxing everyone, I'll just say - I'll be a bit less around for a bit, here and any other haunts I frequent. Gotta getta buncha stuff all straightened up and sent off so I can not get paid for some actual work (yes, chatting to you guys is what I consider leisure - messed, eh?).

Boy, I almost miss kitchen work. At least they pay you to suffer creatively there. This scrivening gig is kinda trickier.

I do have a lovely photo of a dead and moldy shrew to put up on the page, but that probably won't be 'til the weekend at best, and maybe not 'til after the Sunday market. It was my reward for cruelly starving the cat - I tried to put her on healthy-cat stuff, but she likes McWhiskas greasy crap MUCH better and was willing to prove it.

I let her stow the mice around, though. I knew she wasn't going to eat them and was just doing it to be demonstrably hungry. What broke my will was her pathetically badly acted pitiful efforts to eat a bit of smushed raw dough off the floor. I have never seen anyone look that hammishly doleful in my life. She got the Whiskas within twenty minutes of that. Besides, I got tired of finding Healthy Cat in a ten-foot arc around the feeding area. Little b*(&h.

Leisure, yesssss.pronounced "leh zhe" if you like.and i do.Peace out Reptor dude.where is everybody?waaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!I'm a detective!(eyes bulging)Giant (I have it on good authority they're dust mites) holograph overhead.No, they are nanobugs, er macrobugs...

@3G - Nine Limes. You know, that could be a book title. You should write some articles about your various dietary experiences - you've had some pretty edgy ones.

@Fletcher - Re: Where Is Everyone?

Well, if they're using Wista, they may be back at Jeff's last post. I was over in the big town using the Laptop of the Librarian Of My Life (free wireless whilst waiting for a lovely lunch date), and the Wista-equipped sucker was consistently driving searches for Rigint to the Had To Look Away post, refresh or no refresh.

Firefox on Vista also did something odd with other searches - not having bookmarks aboard the little beast, I used Google to search up my fave news pages. Some of them, Vive Le Canada, Bloomberg, and a few others, would just generate an hourglass and then a 'done' thingy without leaving the Google bar. Consistently.

Opened in a new window, the links involved just brought up a blank 'done' page. Frickin' eerie. Bill Gates and all his lackeys should be forced to give oral pleasure to a two-headed Russian research dog for the rest of time.

Before anyone laughs at me for using Wista, I don't normally. The Librarian's Laptop only wears the miserable thing to fit in at conferences anyway.

I am driving Windows, though. I have an old and custom-busted unit that serves me well and securely. To move on, I'll need to go through a major learning curve (as I'll be using something Linux-based after this), and some of the software I have on this thing is, well, deeply classic and pretty much impregnable. No need to change just yet.

Anyway, some people are obviously here. I've been getting some funny-ass e-mails. I'll refer the sulphourous little flamers in question to the lyrics of the Mutoid classic F&*%^ng Mind.

Mmm, I should put that on my Punk Channel. There's some vinyl I'd like to find.

@Hellhound - Jeez, you stop barking just like the neighbour's dogs when I growl back. Of course, they've seen me naked and heavily armed at two in the morning. I'd be taken aback for a minute myself. If I'm quiet for a while, do I get another email? Or are you out of weird tracts?

"That's the real signal in all of this. Everything else is just noise."

Yeah I was just reading neuroscience John R. Smythies' work through Science Citation Index. He was referenced in John Geiger's book "Chapel of Extreme Experience" about Bryon Gysin's "dream machine" -- a strobe light to produce theta scintillating visual sensations while your eyes are closed.

Anyway so Smythies' does the same for neuroscience as what you, Kimball, do for "ufology." Smythies' own research was an extension of earlier olfactory bulb studies, proving that, in fact, the brain works on what he calls "AM" functions -- amplitude modification.

So it's not what the signal is -- there is no "one-to-one" map of brain to "mind" perceptions (even though this continues to be the mainstream science "nuts and bolts" view). Instead the same neuron synapses are used for different sensations so that the same smell activated after a second smell, will now use different neurons. The synapse connections are constantly changing every tenth of a second.

In other words what's a "signal" and what's "noise" is based on nonlinear statistics -- what science calls "quantum chaos." They need supercomputers to model this stuff but actual "reality" is too complex (for example the mind of the planet -- the Amazon rainforest).

Of course if you get into analyzing what signal and noise means via amplitude, frequency, phase-shift -- from a fundamentally nonlinear, non-deterministic framework then on a logically level it's proven that science itself is just another "dream machine."

Initially, the then president Bush was supposed to vomit "in the mouth" of the Japanese Prime Minister, incapacitating him with a mix of curare and pentathol. The killing blow was to come later at the hospital.But, in typical Bush fashion, he wimped out.

Luckily the Yakuza, repressed Japanese that they are, actually feared the smell of Bush's vomit far more than they feared being assassinated.They rolled over quite nicely.

After an extensive search of my archives, I've stumbled upon a few details about George H. W. Bush: Assassin.

Initially, the curare pentathol brew was concealed in Mr. Bush's 5th molar.Now, if you look at the above film, at 0:10 Mr. Bush begins to grind his teeth. This was an annoying habit the President used in uncomfortable social situations. Seems he always had a bit of an inferiority complex. He really rankled at that "wimp" tag Newsweek laid on him. Most men his age would just go out and plop their fat asses on a new Harley, but him? He had to take over the Yakuza.I don't know...I guess if my knees were that nobbly and my voice was that high reedy and quavering, I'd probably over compensate too.

But anyway, he starts grinding his teeth, releasing the curare/pentathol brew into his system.

At 0:13, the narcotic begins to take effect and he collapses.

Damn near died.

They were forced to give him an intravenous shot of Ft. Dettrick brand Meth-Amphetamine.

The man with the stimulant vaults the table at 0:40. Making the agent with the pharmaceutical football always be a black man is typical "secret government" humor. They mock us by playing on our stereotypes. Stereotypes that they originally programmed into us.

At 0:44, Bush looks like he could run the damn marathon. Of course, all that Army grade speed in him, he's lucky his heart didn't burst.

It looks like 9/11 and the Bush years make their exit together. The rest of our days will be spent paying for the sins of our fathers. It's called slavery and the bills are coming in by the wheelbarrow full. There's the karma debt that will never be satisfied. There's the national debt for those who let freedom slip through their greasy palms and there is the deficit debt which the next generation must pay for allowing themselves to be dumbed down to the dance on the head of pin.

@Vaginal S. : Interesting video. Seems to me not unlikely that Bush was in fact poisoned at that dinner. His wife (whose real name is probably Otto), much quicker than the Secret Service boys, gets something clapped over his face - and does something behind it. Broad-spectrum antidote for common elite-use poisons? Temporary system booster to get him to medevac w/o political troubles?

After all, powerful as he is, the public Caesars of America are just front men, top execs, servants. I expect Bush and clan are made responsible for their own lives and also responsible for keeping little struggles like that from becoming anything more than a funny vomit story. If Barbarotto there hadn'y acted, Daddy Bush would have been another choked-on-puke stat. And Ronald Reagan would have been laughing to shit in his ultracold hypobaric slow-life waiting chamber.

@Ericswan - Sins of the fathers? Sounds like sins of the earthworms, 'cause that's what's left after the sinner gone. Sure, we're about to get the biggest fleecing yet - and it looks like it's time for a cull, too.

Undesirable traits developing. You just can't let a civilization go to flower like this - then it might seed, and where's a Monsanto-style long-pig farmer then? Up Utopia creek with egalitarianism for a paddle, that's where.

Don't worry about the future bills to pay. They're just as real as the pie up in the sky. Look to yours on earth - remember, self-help is often just a matter of not being too embarrassed to be first in line at the buffet or to take the last piece of chicken if that's what's left when you get there.

Now, if some pig in front of you takes all the chicken, you might think about getting some of it off his plate somehow.

You could say 'goddamit, that's my chicken!'. Won't work.

You could draw the attention of the crowd to him - but you won't get any f$%ken chicken that way, and plus nobody will ever trust you again.

You could kick him in the leg surreptitiously and then 'help clean up', filling your pockets with chicken - seems like a popular choice these days. Fine if you don't mind dirty chicken in your pockets.

You could wait 'til he's done and then clean his table, eating the diseased remnants in the kitchen and being thankful for them. That's for Christians.

You could go to a different restaurant. Looks like they're serving mud, earthquakes, and radiation at the other establishments. I like chicken better, but battery farms are so...well, you know.

Or.....

you could raise your own chickens. Once the popularity of the Chicken Empire Chain goes down, you might even find you have extra chicken of your own to sell (i.e., perhaps the Paulites will lower taxes after hanging the foolish imperials who didn't get word in time).

Mmmm - speaking of foolish imperials who won't get word in time - whaddaya think the going rate is to get into the gold-plated extermination chamber under Denver airport? I sure wouldn't buy an underground railway ticket from the kind of guys that ran the last War.

"That'll be one billion - thanks, step this way, next..."

"Oh, Henry, thank goodness we sold the estates in Paraguay! Why, we'd never be safe there!"

"Yes, Paulette, I've always said I would take care of things, haven't I?"

"Sir, Ma'am - if you could just step into the Decontamination area? No, no need to disrobe - just make sure to remove all your jewelry, cards, gold, and other conductives - the field is very gentle and they disrupt its effectiveness..."

"Oh, Henry! This is all so civilized! Why, I thought it would be more like some kind of camp!"

Well pp. 680-2 in the edition I have (Random House, 1934) are especially interesting since he's detailing the tone of voice of females as an indescribably rich identifier of their identity. He gives some examples of things they may or may not say (but still think) depending on their age but still emphasizes that the meaning of the voice is beyond words. I can dig that but still Proust didn't take that clue far enough. haha.

yall could do with a 7 day media fast, just shut it all off for a week, it will do wonders for your constitution if you can get over the shaking, sweating, withdrawls. Its very refreshing and i recommend it.

@Ericswan - So they do have one. Cooool. I can't wait for Aurora TV in the skies near me.

@Ghoulie - You can learn even more by grabbing hold of one of the soft lovely very much not formless things - you know, the ones you look at, listen to, long for? Walk over there and introduce yourself. THAT's what the Scope is for.

Hoping all you freaks are having a good night (even you guys, Mousie and Hellhound),Lord Reptor.

Thanks for sharing more on Proust. The edition I have is only two books and also after going through it more I returned it to the "free book shelf" at Potbellys, a Starbucks-owned sandwich cafe where Bridgemans used to be in Dinkytown (14th Ave. and 4th St.). So that Proust book sat in Potbelly's for over a year and no one grabbed it which proved what I feared most -- that a cold front had descended into the intellectual climate at the U of MN. haha.

As for Jonah Lehrer's book -- I've speed read it a couple times already so will probably give it a word for word read. There's some problems with his music analysis but I'm a gadfly about music and science. Although he discusses the "fugal-cortical" network which is based on Bach whose work I've performed my memory and I've also composed a fugue based on a study I did at Hampshire college. Anyway the synathesia stuff is what makes Proust interesting -- those first 30 pages where he does the "twilight psychology" that almost caused the publisher to refuse the work.

As for aristocratic culture I JUST finished a book that is fascinating -- Patricia Beard's "AFTER THE BALL: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betyrayals and the Party that Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905" (2003).

Wow she did a top-knotch job of covering the culture, economics, politics, etc. -- surrounding the top 400 corporate elite from post-Civil War and how that structure has stayed in place even today. James Hyde literally did hide in the literari scene -- which for me just confirmed the real purpose of most literature -- escapism for the elite. I'm a mystic myself with the belief that while putting things into words enables your left-brain to acknowledge what it perceives and thereby assimilate it into the dominant culture (of law, science, technology, etc.) real perception is a phenomenon of consciousness which is faster than light. My whole philosophy is based on how nonwestern music harmonics enables resonance with consciousness faster-than-light.

Glad that got to you. I watched it about 2 months ago and posted it around a few forums.... Actually saw her book about the stroke, etc. -- on display at B & N downtown Mpls. So I speed read it -- what I found interesting was she claimed that her right brain was much SLOWER than her left-brain. Now that her left-brain is up to speed she can process information much faster. Also she couldn't write with a pen -- since that was a left-brain operation but she could type at a keyboard (albeit slowly) since you use both hands and therefore both sides of the brain.

Anyway that goes with what I was saying about the value of language processing in terms of "speed" -- but I still think the right brain is under-rated for what's called in yoga "direct perception." The concept of "pure consciousness" is not allowed in science -- that there's a substance beyond spacetime which is pure knowledge, or the mystic definition of God, better defined in feminine terms in my opinion. So when you tap into pure consciousness through the right-brain activating the pineal gland (based on autonomic nerve transduction) then the processing of information bypasses the need for relying on language and in fact the "pure consciousness" is then transposed by the brain into images or language.

For example there's a blog called "mindhacks" -- you can google that. Their latest post or recent one is on how people with psychosis but who are bilingual will often have their symptoms dramatically disappear when they are speaking their second language. I know this Russian lady (about my age) whom I was forced to evict from a house (but I gave her a good recommendation so she could move). She wanders around Dinkytown ranting to herself -- in Russian. But I now wonder how English might make her symptoms disappear. I saw her once calmly spending time with other immigrants -- Latinos. So they must have been relying on English and also I seemed to break through with her when speaking in English. The shoebox of empty psychotropic bottles that she left was certainly disturbing along with her behavioral symptoms which others argued endangered their welfare.

Hell, if I would have known this a few years back, I would have ignored the wheezing and chest rattling coughing spells and my inability to run very far without feeling like my chest was going to burst and the huge amounts of grayish goo I'd spit up continuously, and I would have kept on puffing like a demented little smokestack.Anything to maintain my "ability to question."

Now that I am now enlightened I can see how quitting smoking is the reason I now crave a Big Mac, and why I now find myself seeing the brilliance of the Iraq War strategy, and why I've come to only wear clothes that have a logo prominently displayed, etc., etc.

Of course, this is fucking idiotic. Everyone I work with smokes. Every half hour the little addicts are sneaking out for another fix. Surprisingly enough, they're all still as clueless as the day is long. These folk are so fucked up, they'll watch TV for long periods and....here's the fucked up part...actually enjoy themselves.

But that's why they call this pseudo-science, isn't it? Dubious ideas backed up with dubious logic.

In this case, the Nazis banned smoking so that must mean cigarettes are good, eh? Anything a Nazi would agree to must, in and of itself, make it a bad thing. Gee, I bet the Nazis liked eating too. Does that mean that we should have a huge, public fork melting. And I bet the Nazis loved fucking. Hell, who doesn't? I'd even bet that the state of post-coital bliss puts one in a "highly suggestible" mood where one's critical faculties are on temporay hiatus. So, who's ready to sheath their 'love muscle" or lock-box their "venus mound?"

With the internet, I think human gullibilty has finally hit the viral stage.

Every year, thousands of medical doctors and other members of the “Anti-Smoking Inquisition” spend billions of dollars perpetuating what has unquestionably become the most misleading though successful social engineering scam in history. With the encouragement of most western governments, these Orwellian lobbyists pursue smokers with a fanatical zeal that completely overshadows the ridiculous American alcohol prohibition debacle, which started in 1919 and lasted until 1933. Nowadays we look back on American prohibition with justifiable astonishment. Is it really true that an entire nation allowed itself to be denied a beer or scotch by a tiny group of tambourine-bashing fanatics? Sadly, yes it is, despite a total lack of evidence that alcohol causes any harm to humans, unless consumed in truly astronomical quantities. Alas, the safety of alcohol was of no interest to the tambourine-bashers, for whom control over others was the one and only true goal. Americans were visibly “sinning” by enjoying themselves having a few alcoholic drinks, and the puritans interceded on behalf of God to make them all feel miserable again. Although there is no direct link between alcohol and tobacco, the history of American prohibition is important, because it helps us understand how a tiny number of zealots managed to control the behavior and lives of tens of millions of people. Nowadays exactly the same thing is happening to smokers, though this time it is at the hands of government zealots and ignorant medical practitioners rather than tambourine-bashing religious fanatics. Certain governments know that their past actions are directly responsible for causing most of the lung and skin cancers in the world today, so they go to extreme lengths in trying to deflect responsibility and thus financial liability away from themselves, and onto harmless organic tobacco instead. As we will find later in the report, humble organic tobacco has never hurt anyone, and in certain ways can justifiably claim to provide startling health protection. Not all governments around the world share the same problem. Japan and Greece have the highest numbers of adult cigarette smokers in the world, but the lowest incidence of lung cancer. In direct contrast to this, America, Australia, Russia, and some South Pacific island groups have the lowest numbers of adult cigarette smokers in the world, but the highest incidence of lung cancer. This is clue number-one in unraveling the absurd but entrenched western medical lie that “smoking causes lung cancer.”

The first European contact with tobacco was in 1492, when Columbus and fellow explorer Rodriguo de Jerez saw natives smoking in Cuba. That very same day, de Jerez took his first puff and found it very relaxing, just as the locals had assured him it would be. This was an important occasion, because Rodriguo de Jerez discovered what the Cubans and native Americans had known for many centuries: that cigar and cigarette smoking is not only relaxing, it also cures coughs and other minor ailments. When he returned home, Rodriguo de Jerez proudly lit a cigar in the street, and was promptly arrested and imprisoned for three years by the horrified Spanish Inquisition. De Jerez thus became the first victim of the anti-smoking lobbies. In less than a century, smoking became a much enjoyed and accepted social habit throughout Europe, with thousands of tons of tobacco being imported from the colonies to meet the increasing demand. A growing number of writers praised tobacco as a universal remedy for mankind’s ills. By the early 20th Century almost one in every two people smoked, but the incidence of lung cancer remained so low that it was almost immeasurable. Then something extraordinary happened on July 16, 1945: a terrifying cataclysmic event that would eventually cause western governments to distort the perception of smoking forever. As K. Greisen recalls: “When the intensity of the light had diminished, I put away the glass and looked toward the tower directly. At about this time I noticed a blue color surrounding the smoke cloud. Then someone shouted that we should observe the shock wave travelling along the ground. The appearance of this was a brightly lighted circular area, near the ground, slowly spreading out towards us. The color was yellow. “The permanence of the smoke cloud was one thing that surprised me. After the first rapid explosion, the lower part of the cloud seemed to assume a fixed shape and to remain hanging motionless in the air. The upper part meanwhile continued to rise, so that after a few minutes it was at least five miles high. It slowly assumed a zigzag shape because of the changing wind velocity at different altitudes. The smoke had pierced a cloud early in its ascent, and seemed to be completely unaffected by the cloud.” This was the notorious “Trinity Test”, the first dirty nuclear weapon to be detonated in the atmosphere. A six-kilogram sphere of plutonium, compressed to supercriticality by explosive lenses, Trinity exploded over New Mexico with a force equal to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT. Within seconds, billions of deadly radioactive particles were sucked into the atmosphere to an altitude of six miles, where high-speed jet streams could circulate them far and wide. The American Government knew about the radiation in advance, was well aware of its lethal effects on humans, but bluntly ordered the test with a complete disregard for health and welfare. In law, this was culpable gross negligence, but the American Government did not care. Sooner or later, one way or the other, they would find another culprit for any long-term effects suffered by Americans and other citizens in local and more remote areas. If a single microscopic radioactive fallout particle lands on your skin at the beach, you get skin cancer. Inhale a single particle of the same lethal muck, and death from lung cancer becomes inevitable, unless you happen to be an exceptionally lucky cigarette smoker. The solid microscopic radioactive particle buries itself deep in the lung tissue, completely overwhelms the body’s limited reserves of vitamin B17, and causes rampant uncontrollable cell multiplication. How can we be absolutely sure that radioactive fallout particles really cause lung cancer every time a subject is internally exposed? For real scientists, as opposed to medical quacks and government propagandists, this is not a problem. For any theory to be accepted scientifically, it must first be proven in accordance with rigorous requirements universally agreed by scientists. First the suspect radioactive agent must be isolated, then used in properly controlled laboratory experiments to produce the claimed result, i.e. lung cancer in mammals. Scientists have ruthlessly sacrificed tens of thousands of mice and rats in this way over the years, deliberately subjecting their lungs to radioactive matter. The documented scientific results of these various experiments are identical. Every mouse or rat obediently contracts lung cancer, and every mouse or rat then dies. Theory has thus been converted to hard scientific fact under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. The suspect agent [radioactive matter] caused the claimed result [lung cancer] when inhaled by mammals.

The overall magnitude of lung cancer risk to humans from atmospheric radioactive fallout cannot be overstated. Before Russia, Britain and America outlawed atmospheric testing on August 5, 1963, more than 4,200 kilograms of plutonium had been discharged into the atmosphere. Because we know that less than one microgram [millionth of a single gram] of inhaled plutonium causes terminal lung cancer in a human, we therefore know that your friendly government has lofted 4,200,000,000 [4.2 Billion] lethal doses into the atmosphere, with particle radioactive half-life a minimum of 50,000 years. Frightening? Unfortunately it gets worse. The plutonium mentioned above exists in the actual nuclear weapon before detonation, but by far the greatest number of deadly radioactive particles are those derived from common dirt or sand sucked up from the ground, and irradiated while travelling vertically through the weapon’s fireball. These particles form by far the largest part of the “smoke” in any photo of an atmospheric nuclear detonation. In most cases several tons of material are sucked up and permanently irradiated in transit, but let us be incredibly conservative and claim that only 1,000 kilograms of surface material is sucked up by each individual atmospheric nuclear test. Before being banned by Russia, Britain and America, a total of 711 atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted, thereby creating 711,000 kilograms of deadly microscopic radioactive particles, to which must be added the original 4,200 kilograms from the weapons themselves, for a gross though very conservative total of 715,200 kilograms. There are more than a million lethal doses per kilogram, meaning that your governments have contaminated your atmosphere with more than 715,000,000,000 [715 Billion] such doses, enough to cause lung or skin cancer 117 times in every man, woman and child on earth. Before you ask, no, the radioactive particles do not just “fade away”, at least not in your lifetime or that of your children and grandchildren. With a half-life of 50,000 years or longer, these countless trillions of deadly government-manufactured radioactive particles are essentially with you forever. Circulated around the world by powerful jet streams, these particles are deposited at random, though in higher concentrations within a couple of thousand miles of the original test sites. A simple wind or other surface disturbance is all that is needed to stir them up again and create enhanced dangers for those in the vicinity. The once-innocent activity of playfully kicking sand around on the beach in summer could nowadays easily translate to suicide, if you happen to stir up a few radioactive particles that could stick to your skin or be inhaled into your lungs. Stop poking fun at Michael Jackson when he appears at your local airport wearing a surgical mask over his nose and mouth. He may look eccentric, but Michael will almost certainly outlive most of us.

Twelve years after the cataclysmic Trinity test, it became obvious to western governments that things were getting completely out of control, with a 1957 British Medical Research Council report stating that global “deaths from lung cancer have more than doubled during the period 1945 to 1955”, though no explanation was offered. During the same ten-year period, cancer deaths in the immediate proximity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up threefold. By the end of official atmospheric testing in 1963, the incidence of lung cancer in the Pacific Islands had increased fivefold since 1945. Having screwed your environment completely for 50,000 years, it was time for “big government” to start taking heavy diversionary action. How could people be proved to be causing themselves to contract lung cancer, i.e. be said to be guilty of a self inflicted injury for which government could never be blamed or sued? The only obvious substance that people inhaled into their lungs, apart from air, was tobacco smoke, so the government boot was put in. Poorly qualified medical “researchers” suddenly found themselves overwhelmed with massive government grants all aimed at achieving the same end-result: “Prove that smoking causes lung cancer”. Real scientists [especially some notable nuclear physicists] smiled grimly at the early pathetic efforts of the fledgling anti-smoking lobby, and lured them into the deadliest trap of all. The quasi medical researchers were invited to prove their false claims under exactly the same rigid scientific rules that were used when proving that radioactive particles cause lung cancer in mammals. Remember, for any theory to be accepted scientifically, it must first be proven in accordance with rigorous requirements universally agreed by scientists. First the suspect agent [tobacco smoke] must be isolated, then used in properly controlled laboratory experiments to produce the claimed result, i.e. lung cancer in mammals. Despite exposing literally tens of thousands of especially vulnerable mice and rats to the equivalent of 200 cigarettes per day for years on end, “medical science” has never once managed to induce lung cancer in any mouse or rat. Yes, you did read that correctly. For more than forty years, hundreds of thousands of medical doctors have been deliberately lying to you. The real scientists had the quasi medical researchers by the throat, because “pairing” the deadly radioactive particle experiment with the benign tobacco smoke experiment, proved conclusively for all time that smoking cannot under any circumstances cause lung cancer. And further, in one large “accidental” experiment they were never allowed to publish, the real scientists proved with startling clarity that smoking actually helps to protect against lung cancer. All mice and rats are used one-time-only in a specific experiment, and then destroyed. In this way researchers ensure that the results of whatever substance they are testing cannot be accidentally “contaminated” by the real or imagined effects of another substance. Then one day as if by magic, a few thousand mice from the smoking experiment “accidentally” found their way into the radioactive particle experiment, which in the past had killed every single one of its unfortunate test subjects. But this time, completely against the odds, sixty percent of the smoking mice survived exposure to the radioactive particles. The only variable was their prior exposure to copious quantities of tobacco smoke. 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'Vishnu, Bhagavad-Gita

Government pressure was immediately brought to bear and the facts suppressed, but this did not completely silence the real scientists. Tongue in cheek perhaps, Professor Schrauzer, President of the International Association of Bio-inorganic Chemists, testified before a U.S. congressional committee in 1982 that it had long been well known to scientists that certain constituents of tobacco smoke act as anti-carcinogens [anti-cancer agents] in test animals. He continued that when known carcinogens [cancer causing substances] are applied to the animals, the application of constituents of cigarette smoke counter them. Nor did Professor Schrauzer stop there. He further testified on oath to the committee that “no ingredient of cigarette smoke has been shown to cause human lung cancer”, adding that “no-one has been able to produce lung cancer in laboratory animals from smoking.” It was a neat answer to a rather perplexing problem. If government blocks publication of your scientific paper, take the alternate route and put the essential facts on the written congressional record! Predictably, this hard truth drove the government and quasi medical “researchers” into a frenzy of rage. By 1982 they had actually started to believe their own ridiculous propaganda, and were not to be silenced by eminent members of the scientific establishment. Quite suddenly they switched the blame to other “secret” ingredients put into cigarettes by the tobacco companies. “Yes, that must be it!” they clamored eagerly, until a handful of scientists got on the phone and pointed out that these same “secret” ingredients had been included in the mice experiments, and had therefore also been proved incapable of causing lung cancer. Things were looking desperate for government and the medical community overall. Since the anti-smoking funding had started in the early sixties, tens of thousands of medical doctors had passed through medical school, where they had been taught that smoking causes lung cancer. Most believed the lie, but cracks were starting to appear in the paintwork. Even the dullest of straight “C” doctors could not really make the data correlate, and when they queried it were told not to ask stupid questions. “Smoking causes lung cancer” converted to a creed, a quasi religious belief mechanism where blind faith became a substitute for proof. Even blind faith needs a system of positive reinforcement, which in this case became the advertising agencies and the media. Suddenly the television screens were flooded with images of terribly blackened “smoker’s lungs”, with the accompanying mantra that you will die in horrible agony if you don’t quit now. It was all pathetic rubbish of course. On the mortuary slab the lungs of a smoker and non-smoker look an identical pink, and the only way a forensic pathologist can tell you might have been a smoker, is if he finds heavy stains of nicotine on your fingers, a packet of Camels or Marlboro in your coat pocket, or if one of your relatives unwisely admits on the record that you once smoked the demon weed.

The black lungs? From a coal miner, who throughout his working life breathed in copious quantities of microscopic black coal dust particles. Just like radioactive particles they get caught deep in the tissue of the lungs and stay there forever. If you worked down the coal mines for twenty or more years without a face mask, your lungs will probably look like this on the slab. Many people ask exactly how it is that those smoking mice were protected from deadly radioactive particles, and even more are asking why real figures nowadays are showing far more non-smokers dying from lung cancer than smokers. Professor Sterling of the Simon Fraser University in Canada is perhaps closest to the truth, where he uses research papers to reason that smoking promotes the formation of a thin mucous layer in the lungs, “which forms a protective layer stopping any cancer-carrying particles from entering the lung tissue.” This is probably as close as we can get to the truth at present, and it does make perfect scientific sense. Deadly radioactive particles inhaled by a smoker would initially be trapped by the mucous layer, and then be ejected from the body before they could enter the tissue. All of this may be a bit depressing for non-smokers, but there are probably one or two things you can do to minimize the risks as far as possible. Rather than shy away from smokers in your local pub or club, get as close as you can and breathe in their expensive second-hand smoke. Go on, don’t be shy, suck in a few giant breaths. Or perhaps you could smoke one cigarette or small cigar after each meal, just three a day to build up a thin boundary mucous layer. If you cannot or will not do either of the above, consider phoning Michael Jackson to ask for a spare surgical mask!

Thanks for that, its good to hear from somebody who thinks the fall of western civilization as we know it is worth commenting on. The strange part is so many other people don't.

I think for some they are just trying to keep the positive attitude, which is fine. But for some I think its something else, a fear of committing "thoughtcrime", like those who talk about climate change in the wrong company find out they have done.

But most interestingly its about a complete lack of proportion, that's what surprises me. The amount of space floods and vast crop failure get in the news vs Obama and Clinton, says it all. I remember personally when I would half heartedly argue for some aspect of Clinton I liked, and then these people would come back fanatically for Obama, like they had the sense *if they could just beat Clinton* something big would change. Of course it didn't hasn't and won't, because they were fundamentally at war with an illusion. The crop failures, climate change crashing economies are the realities that affect them. Clinton v Obama is a media show regarding figure heads.

But that's the funny thing about the human mind, its ability to believe shows as real, even the one's it feeds itself. I've enough meditation or madness in me to make anything seem significant, to wrap a narrative around a stone that contains my whole life story. But I know also how to limit the gravity of these narratives, so I can take or leave them based on merit, because these internal narratives truly define our worlds.

In that sense, reality is simply the narrative that lasts and doesn't crash to pieces, its the story that leads us through the hard times, the story that, like the Bible, we LIVE. Its enough to say for now that a writer can get to a certain stage where he gradually stops describing reality with his writing and starts creating it. Some mindfully, some not. The line is nebulous, blurry, buts its there. Judy Bloom on one side, Karl Marx on the other. The little Jew who writes the movie reviews on one side, the little Jew who wrote the bible on the other. Big difference.

Anyway, the point is, that I think you are hovering on that line, Jeff, and that most certainly means you are NOT powerless and its not futile. It just might be time to start writing about what could be rather than what is.

Among the most pressing challenges to civilization, nothing is greater than securing our energy future.

A low-cost and flexible biosolar energy nanodevice is one of the long-term solutions. Currently, solar cells are expensive and not affordable—even for the most-developed nations. Radical solutions must be found. Nature has already made efficient photosynthesis molecular nanomachines in thermophilic photosynthetic bacteria, algae and plants. We can isolate or emulate them to stabilize them in extended time onto inexpensive semiconducting nanostructured surface in extremely high density to directly harvest photons. This process must be simple, easy to follow and affordable even for developing nations. Our laboratory is developing the process for a decentralized or individualized system for a very low cost photovoltaic device: biosolar cells.

I did some research on the black-flecked grayish lung fung chunks myself (cigarettes since the single digits, whaddaya want?) and found some interesting stuff too.

The coal-mining thing? From what I read, the black lung is one thing, but the 'black spit' only occurred in workers who were exposed to both the soft coal particulates and the sharp-edged particulates peculiar to granite quarrying, often done near or in tandem with coal extraction.

Lungs got shredded quick, and instead of ejecting the sooty stuff, they built it up and literally rotted away in the trapped, blackened fluid. This from the Lancet - 1790 (most recent issue available without paying, no joke).

That's what finally got me off nicotine. It's not the tar, it's whatever the hell shredded my lungs (decades of janitorial, kitchen, shipyard, landscaping, shipping - take your pick for causes!) That and the frickin' price. Paying those bastards to snuff you is bad enuff, but I think they crank the per-unit lethality along with the price - bastards were tasting like burning carpet there at the end of my lengthy habit.

Second thing - it wasn't just a case of forcing the science to match the theory, in early efforts to blame lung cancer on baccy.

It was worse. C. Everett Koop in '53 or so stated that he believed over half of all lung cancers in adult North American male smokers were the direct result of using uranium-bearing gypsum fertilizer on tobacco crops. Owch. Don't pollute - dilute! Signed, The AEC.

What can I say. To quote Lehrer, don't drink the water and don't breathe the air.

Staying away from that city tapwater (although you might find a youtube search for the last term before the first bracket in this sentence amusing),Lord Reptor.

P.S. Not too sure about the Darkweed curing you in other than a tannery sort of way. Look to the Lightweed, lads.

@Mother Earth - No algae-powered cities 'til we sell the last of that oil at the best possible rate.

And the less oil there is left, the less customers we need, starting with clever joneses and their magic power sources.

I wouldn't buy stock in that or the apparently functional water-powered car that just came out.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the water-powered-car plant ended up being in the neighbourhood of the next truly solid disaster to hit the news. Where do they make those things again?

I actually quite hope for stuff like this biosolar electricity. Frederik Pohl's The Cool War had a great central plot element involving a brilliant African scientist who develops a steerable sun-mirror plant that grows like a weed, enabling simple collection stations to be built everywhere it can take root and thereby solving Africa's energy crisis.

Predictably violent reactions ensue from the powers-that-be. I won't spoil the ending for you.

Goddamn it, I told you people. We're not criminals, we're freedom fighters.& when we were genetically modifying tobacco plants to increase nicotine content, making cigarettes even more addicting, we were just trying to hook everyone so those government mind control rays wouldn't get to you all.

It's about time you people caught on.We here at Phillip Morris expect are Freedom Medals to be in the mail toot-fucking-sweet.

Y'know EW, I had a nice point by point rebuttal typed out. Then I looked up your "source."

What do you know, another fucking internet conspiracy crackpot.

Who'd a thunk it?

I wonder...did Joe the crackpot smoke?

If so, do you think that played a part in his massive coronary?

Maybe he was blasted by the mind control rays cause he was getting uncomfortably close to "da troof."

On second thought, RI-ers have been right about so much, I'm gonna take old Crackpot Joe's word for it that smoking protects us from cancer. I figure my 4 year old is about due for his first pack of Marlboro's anyway, don't you?

As an aside EW, if smoking is so fucking benign, why did it make me feel so horrible?

A feeling that started magically evaporating 2 weeks after I quit?

I do commend you for steering clear of the "carbon monoxide keeps you from being mind controlled" angle.Otherwise you'd look as insanely credulous as old Hakkor.

Maybe after you and hakkor sell people on the "cigarettes are good for you" angle, you can work on the driving under the influence of alcohol "propaganda." The guv-mint seems to frown on that too.

We here at the Mouse Coalition take extreme offense at the nature of the smoking tests on mice. Since any scientist will tell that it is practically impossible to get any mammal other than humans to imbibe smoke,they have a natural aversion to it, we feel that the mice were held down and forced to smoke against their will.

The only exception to this "mammals other than humans don't smoke" rule, is the monkeys who were enticed to free-base cocaine in the late 70s. This we understand. Who wouldn't want to huff a little base, eh?

We feel that Joe Vialls should be dug up and forced to reveal his sources so that the SPCA and PETA can be duly notified.

'Mother Earth,' if they continue to employ nanotech (as the base infrastructure here), it's not a good idea. Nanotech is the new asbestos. Nanotech should be banned as a global health risk. There are many other solutions. Remove that nano base they are talking about and just use the biosolar (similar to synthetic chlorophyll solar) and I think it would be better for you.

"ScienceDaily (May 27, 2008) — A new study into the potential health hazards of the revolutionary nano-sized particles known as 'buckyballs' predicts that the molecules are easily absorbed into animal cells, providing a possible explanation for how the molecules could be toxic to humans and other organisms.

Using computer simulations, University of Calgary biochemist Peter Tieleman, post-doctoral fellow Luca Monticelli and colleagues modeled the interaction between carbon-60 molecules and cell membranes and found that the particles are able to enter cells by permeating their membranes without causing mechanical damage.

"Buckyballs are already being made on a commercial scale for use in coatings and materials but we have not determined their toxicity," said Tieleman, a Senior Scholar of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research who specializes in membrane biophysics and biocomputing. "There are studies showing that they can cross the blood-brain barrier and alter cell functions, which raises a lot of questions about their toxicity and what impact they may have if released into the environment."

...

Fullerenes have been shown to cause brain damage in fish and inhaling carbon nanotubes results in lung damage similar to that caused by asbestos.

"Buckyballs commonly form into clumps that could easily be inhaled by a person as dust particles," Tieleman said. "How they enter cells and cause damage is still poorly understood but our model shows a possible mechanism for how this might occur."

ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2005) — Soccer-ball-shaped “buckyballs” are the most famous players on the nanoscale field, presenting tantalizing prospects of revolutionizing medicine and the computer industry.

Since their discovery in 1985, engineers and scientists have been exploring the properties of these molecules for a wide range of applications and innovations.

But could these microscopic spheres represent a potential environmental hazard?

A new study published in December 2005 in Biophysical Journal raises a red flag regarding the safety of buckyballs when dissolved in water.

It reports the results of a detailed computer simulation that finds buckyballs bind to the spirals in DNA molecules in an aqueous environment, causing the DNA to deform, potentially interfering with its biological functions and possibly causing long-term negative side effects in people and other living organisms.

Cummings suggests that his research reveals a potentially serious problem: “Buckyballs have a potentially adverse effect on the structure, stability and biological functions of DNA molecules.”

The findings came as something of a surprise, despite earlier studies that have shown buckyballs to be toxic to cells unless coated and to be able to find their way into the brains of fish.

Before these cautionary discoveries, researchers thought that the combination of buckyballs’ dislike of water and their affinity for each other would cause them to clump together and sink to the bottom of a pool, lake, stream or other aqueous environment. As a result, researchers thought they should not cause a significant environmental problem.

Cummings’ team found that, depending on the form the DNA takes, the 60-carbon-atom (C60) buckyball molecule can lodge in the end of a DNA molecule and break apart important hydrogen bonds within the double helix. They can also stick to the minor grooves on the outside of DNA, causing the DNA molecule to bend significantly to one side. Damage to the DNA molecule is even more pronounced when the molecule is split into two helices, as it does when cells are dividing or when the genes are being accessed to produce proteins needed by the cell.

Posted: June 6, 2008

Problematic new findings regarding toxicity of silver nanoparticles

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Engineered nanoparticles are rapidly becoming a part of our daily life in the form of cosmetics, food packaging, drug delivery systems, therapeutics, biosensors, etc. A number of commercial products such as wound dressing, detergents or antimicrobial coatings are already in the market. Although little [A LOT!] is known about their bio distribution and bio activity, especially silver nanoparticles are extensively used for all kinds of antimicrobial applications.

Ultimately, these nanoparticles end up in the environment during waste disposal. Largely due to a scarcity of data on the toxicity, intracellular distribution and fate of silver ions and nanoparticles inside an organism, regulatory bodies so far have not felt the need to regulate the use of such materials in commercial products or disposal of such products.

In a major reversal, although more of a symbolic gesture, earlier last year the U.S. EPA has determined that clothes washing machines that use silver ions as a disinfectant will have to be registered as a pesticide (The first federal restrictions on nanotechnology could be coming soon).

Reading this blog is soo funny. Lord Reptor, you should be a comedian, you are a delight to peruse. Really Jeff, wit is forever. No more sad stories about our demise. Humor is the cure. Mortality is reality, no one get's out here alive. Been reading about the Gnostics and in particular the Cathars. They will kill you,but first they must catch you!Inquisition. A world view that promotes rapture is so whack. The transmigration of souls is a wholsome outlook. We have all been here before. Make use of the time we have on earth, make things right with your loved ones. Worship the light bringer, and Hail Isis. Shine forth brave souls! Respectfully, Dennis from Oregon.

Shrub..I'm surprised that you haven't heard of Joe Vialls. He may have died under mysterious circumstances and in the middle of some deep dark psy op investigation but his legacy leaves many conspiracy theorists wanting. As a matter of "fact" I worked in a uranium mine where hundreds of men died from silicosis. In 1975, the management decided to introduce a program of spraying the men coming off the cage with aluminum powder claiming that such a coating of aluminum would curtail the effects of the very sharp and pointy silica dust. This spraying continued into the "dry" where the men changed and showered. What does this prove you ask? You are on your buddy. Figure it out.

"...On my better days I think thatthere is something I dont know orthere is somethin that I'm leavinout. But them times are seldom.I wake up sometimes way in thenight and I know as certain asdeath that there aint nothin shortof the second comin of Christ thatcan slow this train. I dont knowwhat is the use of me layin awakeover it. But I do."

Cormac McCarthy

"While the world is burning down,lets make the best of whatsstill around.."

The Police

Mark: There is increasing evidenceof a link between nanotechnologyand Morgellons Syndrome.

@Ericswan - Geez, I thought I had a lousy chemical exposure history. All I got was heavy metals and funky volatiles and varied exhaust gases. You got to play Rayman. Crappy deal.

Silicosis - is that like asbestosis symptom-wise? I know (nearly knew, but he pulled through drinking gallons of aloe juice and annoying his oncologist) a fellow who worked as an engineer on quite a few biggies here in B.C., including a stint up at Kemano.

He was diagnosed with asbestosis, of, twenty-five years ago - might be more, actually. A few years ago Mr. B got a case of the cancerous gutworm (stomach C found on endoscopy and then further horrid rot found burrowing lower).

Prognosis - don't attempt to leave town. Make out your will and here's your bill.

So off to the clinics and wards he went, where they found that the lung-chunks they had been calling asbestosis (on lab analysis, too) were actually cancer tissue so advanced that it was shedding cells from its foul crowns in B's alveoli like flowers seeding (rather too literally like that).

Makes you wonder how many other engineers on these projects have coughed themselves to death and called it COPD, silicosis, asbestosis, what-have-you, hell, tuberculosis - how many of those are cancer cases? Is there perhaps a 'merciful' ethos involved, not telling terminal cases the truth? This question certainly arises should one happen to be reflecting on a few of the things said earlier on this thread regarding concealment of radioactive fallout effects. How much lung cancer is there anyway?

Now, B took this stuff in stride - he's a Scots/Roman old-school boy, and when trouble knocks he calls his friends first. Doctor Death Sentence and his radioactive, drug-toting henchmen said you can go two ways - let us hack it and burn it and sow its fields with glowing salt, and you might make 75. Or, go home, take these pills every two hours (at $30 plus the dose!), and you probably won't see 74 (his next upcoming at the time).

So B went home, not feeling up to the hacking and burning (a tough old rooster, but not that tough), and he took the pills, which were, I think, likely a kind of Easy Red (a euphoric euthanasia drink in T.J. Bass's masterful OLGA novels).

He also called up his buddies. B is Masoned to the tits, and can get a sandwich, a bed, or a police auxiliary badge just about anywhere. Like a lot of these guys, he takes great pleasure in letting you watch a few little bits of their stage magic. Secret signs in exchange for lunch. I just make my own f@#$in lunch, but what the hell, whatever works.

Said buddies laid down some healthy advice, and the quacklore poured in. Extract of Dildong bush, grotberry pits, and the entire aloe output of several Third World nations arrived in costly courier boxes by the truckload. So nice to have money when you're scared.

Don't get me wrong - I like B, and I would do the same if I was remotely able to. Sadly, I'll have to pioneer the morning-glory and thistle cure if my turn comes, as that's what I've got that the coons won't take.

Anyway, something took. His son thinks it was the THC pills (and they were good ones), B thinks it was the aloe, his wife thinks God hates her (I've never seen such a disappointed woman in my life), and his doctor?

His doctor is FURIOUS. His little expensive camera-snake keeps failing to find the big awful horrid lesion with horrid threads and nasty red-rimmed roots punching through white tissues to where its filthy brood hatches, and it was RIGHT THERE, with $$$ written allll over it.

B is now grudgingly allowed to go for RV trips as long as six months now. Christ, there goes the rest of the oil. His stupid rolling pleasure dome is of the class that uses a GMC 3.8 six just to top up the batteries and run the AC. Probably has antiaircraft weapons on the damn thing.

I bet the old bugger has his stupid flashing red light strapped under the dash on the damn thing, just like he has in every car before. We're talking about a man who intentionally followed an obvious drunk from liquor store to highway just to have a high-speed chase in his Continental and whip out his stupid light.

Aaaaanyway, the morals of this long and wandering tale are:

A) Never be sure it isn't cancer, because the doctor might be lying to you in order to save you the trauma of the truth, and

B)Try to have friends who will slip something functional into the nostrums and garbage that serve the cattle for medicament (and when they really want to medicate you, they don't ask or charge - remember all those jabs in school? hope they didn't have good nano then...).

Off to look at photos of Kemano and rage wistfully about Avro and Kaiser and a lot of lies about aluminum welding told by Alcan,Lord Reptor.

Alan Bell says Hezbollah is not likely to be active in Canada following an ABC news report stating Hezbollah is 'activating cells' in Canada plus the heavy references to our favourite Middle Eastern trickpot (our friend the Sand Scorpion, ally and servant and talon of the Eagle) in the article equals...

well...

I'd say about 3:1 odds Northern Canuckistan's about to get a taste of the bearded horror, courtesy of your real-life FX experts in Secretland.

My prediction? Well, here's my recipe for Scaredy Beaver Obeys:

Take 1 Barksdale Brand Special Banger, useless in theater since nobody can get the damn thing installed in Northern Iran to fire at Tel Aviv to set off the show without getting caught by the Iranians or noncompliant Pakistanis or Syrian super-radar or the Green Arrow,

Add 1 Moving Van. Budget? Nah. Let's go with that nice Dominic... whatsisname...Suity? His company. The one that just got the half-million dollar grant.

Drive, carefully, right to the middle of a big bowl of Tar Sands.

Now for a garnish, you can either leave a couple of inflatable arabs in the truck and 'get caught'...but man, patsies don't always rise to the occasion well. Sometimes they go all mushy (as in the Richard Reid recipe) and the prosecution doesn't have ANY public pizzazz, torture the dough as you might.

For guaranteed results, set that sucker off. Then it doesn't matter who gets caught - the lights are out, the building's on fire, and you, muthafu**a, is got the keys. For a lovely touch, why not have some legislation ready ahead of time to wow the guests at service? They'll be amazed (or at least well mazed).

This recipe has worked very well for public consumption before, in venues from New York to London (funny, the Spanish didn't seem to have quite the taste for it we'd hoped - revolution still in their mouths like toothpaste or fine wine). A few bubbles might pop up and complain about the ingredients list, but you can always just whack them later when the dough hardens and forms proper walls.

P.S. Anybody know how to make a link on here? I need buttons - my theory-level stuff is back in the 80's where I left it.

Probably wherever I left all the potential earnings and the life my family would have liked to form me into a topiary sculpture of. Snip, snip, snip - whoops, was that the trunk? Ah, well, doctor says it'll grow right back if we add lithium to the feed!

Rotating my head around and around to old Bad Brains tracks and crying to old Jimi - boy, I love having my own TV channels - my II+ couldn't do this shit, even if it could go on DARPANET, which it could, ho ho ha ha hee hee to the funny farm with me,Lord Reptor.

"...On my better days I think that there is something I dont know or there is somethin that I'm leavin out. But them times are seldom. I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain asdeath that there aint nothin shortof the second comin of Christ thatcan slow this train. I dont knowwhat is the use of me layin awakeover it. But I do."

Cormac McCarthy"

If laying awake and doing nothing (except perhaps reading RI) is all that one does, perhaps right. Though perhaps not right, otherwise:

Bill Strickland tells a quiet and astonishing tale of redemption through arts, music, and unlikely partnerships. As a Pittsburgh youth besieged by racism in the crumbling remains of the steel economy, Bill Strickland should have been one of the Rust Belt's casualties [and a passive-aggressive, reflex-action, dread-addicted reader of Rigorous Intuition]. Instead,...

Whenever a feeling of aversion comes into the heart of a good soul,
it's not without significance.
Consider that intuitive wisdom to be a Divine attribute,
not a vain suspicion:
the light of the heart has apprehendedintuitively from the Universal Tablet. - Rumi